by Shane Carrow
END TIMES
Volume II: The Wasteland
By Shane Carrow
Text copyright © 2017 Shane Carrow
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Alchemy Book Covers
Also by Shane Carrow:
END TIMES Volume I: Rise of the Undead
MARCH
“There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men.”
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
-
March 1
8.30am
Aaron is alive.
That’s what I had to write. In case anyone ever reads this fucking thing. To reassure them. Aaron tried to kill himself, but I stopped him. He’s alive. I’m only writing this now because I went and read his journal after he tried it, to see if he said anything about it. To try to understand.
This is Matt, by the way. His brother. Although I guess you know that if you’ve been reading this far. Fuck, why does he even write in this thing? Who the hell is going to read this? I’m talking to nobody.
Feels good to get your thoughts down though. Even if it’s to nobody. Maybe I can see the point.
Well. Yeah. So we left Albany, Geoff at the wheel of the boat, me tearing Aaron away from Dad’s body. And don’t think Aaron is the only one fucked up about that. I couldn’t even look at him. I don’t want to think about it. It’s not real.
It’s all blended together for me. I remember dragging Aaron onto the boat, him screaming and crying. I remember pulling out of the harbour. I remember the thunder of the shelling from the warships in the bay, rocking in the water from their own recoil, ignoring us and dozens of other little boats creeping out of Albany, breaking the lockdown. I guess we were past rules and curfews by then. All they wanted to do was carpet bomb the town. By the time we were out of King George Sound, Albany was a firestorm.
I remember sitting up on the deck, the sky in the east turning grey, sobbing with my head against Ellie’s chest and her arms wrapped around me. We must have been there for hours.
It was around then, at dawn, the sun just nosing up below a burn of fire on the horizon, that Aaron came up on deck. He was walking unsteadily, like he was drunk, with a thousand-yard stare. I guess I probably looked the same.
He walked past us, stood by the rail, took a few deep breaths through his nose. I thought he was taking in the fresh air. We’d been in the shit-caked refugee paddocks outside Albany for so long I’d forgotten what clean air smelt like. The waves slapped against the bow and a seagull screeched overhead. We were cruising east along the coast, the shoreline a smudge on the grey horizon.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron croaked suddenly. I was about to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that it had been an accident, but then – suddenly, without any warning - he just pitched himself over the edge into the sea.
I stared in shock for a moment before scrambling to the railing. Ellie was screaming at her dad to cut the engine. Once my brain registered what was happening, I hurled myself overboard without a second thought.
I plunged into a world that was cold and dark and dragging me down alarmingly fast. I was still wearing boots and jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and it was the boots that were the real killer. I’m a good swimmer but I hadn’t slept in 24 hours and hadn’t eaten well in weeks. For a moment it was all I could do to keep myself up, keep myself from drowning. The boots were slip-on Blunnies I’d found somewhere on the run from Perth, swapping my worn-out Converse sneakers for them, and thank God for that – if I’d been wearing lace-ups I might have drowned. I kicked them off, pulled my shirt off, struggled to the surface in a sudden gasp of air. I was screaming Aaron’s name but he was nowhere to be seen. I kicked and swam back into the path of the Sea Vixen, the wake still foaming around me, even as I heard Geoff and Ellie yelling. Distant voices, of no consequence…
Aaron’s head broke out of the water and I made straight for him, a quick and choppy freestyle. He was choking and spluttering, and as I reached him we clutched at each other. “I don’t want to die!” he gasped. “I don’t, I’m sorry, Matt, I don’t want to die, please, I don’t want to die…”
“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled, coughing through a mouthful of seawater. “Kick! Swim!”
Ellie had tossed a life jacket in after us, which we clung to like a buoy, while Geoff lowered a gaff hook for us to grab. The two of them hauled us up onto the deck, dripping and gasping. Aaron was sobbing uncontrollably again, murmuring unintelligible things. I wrapped my arms around him and we sat there on the deck. After a while Geoff went back to the wheel, started the engine, and the Sea Vixen was chugging along the coast again. Ellie brought us some towels. She lingered, unsure what to say, but I motioned to her that maybe she should leave Aaron to me.
I made him get out of his wet jeans and t-shirt, and the two of us sat wrapped in towels for a while, watching the sun rise. He cried for a long time, but gave up after a while. I guess you just run dry eventually. He still looked completely despondent and miserable. Fair enough. That was how I felt, too. I didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t want to die,” he said eventually, his voice a ragged croak. “I don’t want to live. But I don’t want to die, either.”
“Jesus, Aaron...”
“I thought I could do it. I thought I could. But the water went up my nose and I couldn’t breath and, and… that’s just the truth. I don’t want to die. No matter how fucked everything is. I don’t want to die. I’m scared of it.”
We watched the sun for a little while, blossoming on the eastern horizon, the Sea Vixen chugging towards it. “It’s not your fault, what happened to Dad,” I said. “It was just an accident. It just…”
Aaron gave me a look. I stopped talking.
“There’s no point in any of this,” he said after a while. “All this shit we’re going through. We should have just stayed in Perth. What’s it matter where we die? We’re going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. Everyone’s going to die…”
“No, we’re not,” I said. “Shut up.”
Aaron turned to look at me, eyes rimmed red, and for the first time I appreciated that something inside him was now well and truly broken. Something was gone that would never come back. “I was keeping a journal,” he said. “You know that?”
“Of course I did.”
“Well, what was the point in that? Who’s ever going to read it? What was the point in holding on to my phone and my wallet as long as I did? What was the point in trying to find Dad? Nothing’s coming back. Things are just going to get worse and worse.”
“Aaron,” I said, speaking carefully, “we just got out of Albany alive. You know how many thousands of people probably died last night? We escaped, we have a boat, we have a place to go. We’re better off than almost everyone…”
“Good for us,” Aaron said bitterly. He stood up, towel still wrapped around himself, and went below.
I turned back to look at the sunrise. “Thanks for jumping in after me, Matt,” I muttered to myself, alone on the deck. “Thanks for saving my life.”
I shouldn’t be like that. He killed our dad. He can react however he wants. I’m glad he’s not completely catatonic.
He killed our dad.
March 1
6.00pm
I guess I may as well keep writing in here. Aaron’s not going to. We’ve been watching him carefully in case he tries anything again. Doesn’t seem like he’s going to, but he’s depressed and withdrawn and won’t say a thing to any of us.
I went up to the wheel and spoke to Geoff, after Aaron slunk below and I’d changed into some fresh clothes. The first thing he said was that he was sorry about Dad. “I didn’t know him long,
but he was a good bloke,” he said. He had his hands on the wheel and his eyes were hidden by his cheap servo sunnies, guarding against the low sun in the east. The sea was getting choppier and I had to hold onto the bulwark to keep my footing.
“He helped me a lot, with the curfew and everything,” Geoff went on. “Getting supplies down to the wharf. And, look – if it had been the other way round, if something had happened to me and he was standing here now, I know that he would have taken care of Ellie. So I’m going to take care of both of you. We’ll get through this together, OK?”
I wondered then how different it would have been if both of them were here. Three kids, two dads. Dads taking care of everything, good old Aussie dads, dads with their boats and their tools and their weapons and their firm decisions. Dads with their knowledge and their wisdom. After that long slog south, after protecting Aaron all that way, I finally could have passed the torch on. Could have just let Dad and Geoff handle everything.
But I can’t do that with Geoff alone because I don’t know him. I find him difficult to read. He was saying the right things, he’s Ellie’s father and she obviously trusts him completely, but I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me and I can’t tell what he thinks of this city kid who’s been cosying up to his daughter. Or what he thinks of my unstable, suicidal brother. Maybe he’s weighing up the risks and the benefits. Maybe he already thinks of us as dead weight.
“So what’s the plan?” I said. “We take the boat all the way to Eucla?”
“Christ no,” Geoff said. “We don’t have the fuel, for a start. Even if we did I wouldn’t risk the Bight, not in a boat like this, not without BOM.”
I don’t know anything about boats but even I could tell he was right. The Sea Vixen is just a pleasure cruiser, a fishing charter, not something equipped to take on the high seas. She’s maybe a thirty-footer. No sails, just an outboard motor. We have plenty of fuel but it’s 800km to Eucla if you hug the coast, which we’ll have to. And a lot of that coast happens to be waves pounding against sheer cliffs.
“So what, then?” I said.
“We’ll have to put down somewhere and find a car. Esperance, probably.”
“Is Esperance meant to be safe?”
“No,” he said. “But that might be a good thing. We can find something abandoned, or… I don’t know. Albany was ‘safe’ and look what happened there.”
I turned back to stern, where even now I could see the thick plume of smoke coming from the burnt-out town, kilometres high, eventually mixing into the clouds in the stratosphere.
“So how long to Esperance?”
“I don’t know. Depends on the weather, on the swell. If it gets really bad we’ll have to put in somewhere. Couple of days, maybe.”
I went to go down below, but Geoff called me back. “Your brother,” he said, eyes still hidden by his sunnies. “Is he going to be OK?”
He wasn’t asking about Aaron’s welfare. He was asking: is he going to be a problem?
“He’s stronger than he thinks he is,” I said.
“I hope so,” Geoff said, and turned his attention back to the sea.
I went down below. Aaron was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, in one of the Sea Vixen’s cramped bunks. Ellie was sitting at the galley table doing a weapons stocktake. I sat down wordlessly, kissed her on the hair and began to help.
We have:
The Winchester .308 we traded the dirtbike for in Denmark, still with twenty-seven rounds. I remember each of the three shots I fired: one to kill a zombie on the South Coast Highway, one in the air to frighten off Ellie’s attackers the night we met her, and one… well. One to kill a conscripted soldier who would have killed us otherwise. Who had already tried to kill us, in fact. I don’t feel bad about that. I feel like I should feel bad, but I don’t. If that makes sense.
We have the Glock, which we took from the zombie cop in the bush up near Collie. That’s empty. You already know why that’s empty.
We have Geoff’s handgun, an antique-looking thing with SMITH & WESSON stamped on it, and only the six rounds in it right now. It looks like the kind of thing Armaguard guys carry when they fill up ATMs, although the serial numbers are filed off. Maybe it came out of an evidence locker; I guess the government in Albany had a pretty random pool of whatever they could find to issue as sidearms to their conscripts.
But they didn’t skimp on the primary weapons. We have three Steyr Augs, standard issue automatic rifles for the ADF. One of them is Geoff’s. One I took from the conscript I shot in the backyard.
And one was Dad’s. The one I pulled out from beneath his body before I even knew it was his body, back when I thought it was just another conscript, some poor bastard Aaron had shot.
I knew which one was his because his blood was smeared all over the stock. I washed it off in the galley sink, working the little plastic pump which draws up seawater from below the hull, watching the blood which had so recently been flowing through my father’s heart mix with the water, dilute, swirl away, disappear forever.
There was a moment then when I felt myself about to break down and cry, but I clamped down on it because I knew that if I did that I wouldn’t be able to stop. I’d end up like Aaron. I’d never be okay again.
So I stood at the sink for a moment longer and then I went and sat back down next to Ellie and we counted the ammo. We have 252 of the 5.56mm rounds that go with the Steyrs, courtesy of Geoff’s careful pilfering of the Albany arms depot, although that’s less than it sounds – only eight and a half magazines.
We checked and cleaned everything. Two of the Steyrs are quite new-looking, but Dad’s is old. You can tell from the nicks and scratches on it, from the little bits of dust built up in the crevices; grit from the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Iraq. It’s a gun that’s been around.
Four people, six guns. That’s a much better equation than we ever could have hoped for. There are, I guess, more guns floating around in Australia than most people would imagine. But there still aren’t that many, and I reckon we’re doing better than most survivors.
On the other hand, maybe the only reason we are survivors at all is because we have guns. If we hadn’t found that Glock, what might have happened as we ran for Liam’s truck in Manjimup? If we hadn’t traded the Kawasaki for the Winchester, what might have happened the night we met Ellie, when I fired a warning shot to scare off her attackers, and they left without a fight?
I don’t need to ask what might have happened the night in Albany, when the soldiers were chasing us over backyard fences. I know exactly what would have happened.
So. We have the guns, and we’re grateful for them. We also have twelve jerry cans of petrol, six jerry cans of water, plenty of dried rice and pasta and tinned food, fully stocked medical kits and a boat. A boat which will apparently not get us to Eucla. Which means that for all our luck so far, and for all our pile of supplies, everything still depends on what we find along the coast. We have a long road ahead of us.
March 2
We weren’t the only ones to make it out of Albany. We’ve seen other vessels in the distance, fishing trawlers and sailboats, and heard garbled radio chatter. One boat approached us this morning, a pleasure cruiser cutting towards us from the coast with a number of figures standing on the deck. We tried to hail them on the radio and they didn’t respond, just kept cutting straight towards us. Geoff fired a burst of shots from his Steyr into the air towards them - a warning shot - and they very quickly took off in the other direction, disappearing over the horizon.
It was frightening. I saw far too many awful things on the road south from Perth to have any illusions about other survivors anymore. But at the same time, it was reassuring. We have guns. And guns are not just for killing. Guns are for having, for showing; guns are a warning.
We’ve pulled into an anchorage tonight – a little cove somewhere east along the coast from Bremer Bay, with a huge sweep of sand dunes and bushland behind it. The middle of nowhere. We’re n
ot actually going ashore – we’ve anchored in shallow water but the boat doesn’t have a tender and I don’t fancy going chest deep in seawater just to stretch my legs.
It’s a horrible evening, anyway – a frigid wind blowing up from Antarctica, rain starting lash down on the ocean to the south and heading towards us. We’ve rummaged up every loose receptacle we can find to fill up on drinking water.
Rain also means clouds, which is good for us. Geoff forbade the use of any lights, even candles. This is a desolate stretch of coastline, nothing behind us but national park, and we’re a good 150 kays east of Albany by now… but you never know who might have made their way out here over the past two months, who might see a glimmer of light down by the water. I’m taking first watch with Aaron, who still isn’t saying much, but seems content to sit by the portholes of the bow cabin with a Steyr in hand, watching the long, gloomy stretch of beach through the rain-streaked glass.
It’s Dad’s gun that he’s using. I haven’t told him that.
March 3
We didn’t get on our way again out of that cove until two o’clock, after the storm had passed, but we now have clear seas and the rainwater gave us an extra bump of drinking water. Not bad, all things considered.
I asked Geoff this morning, as we were waiting for the tide to come in, if he knew for sure whether Eucla was safe. “Of course it is,” he said.
This was the same guy who, just the other day, had talked about how Albany was ‘supposed to be safe.’ “Um,” I said. “It’s your brother who lives there, right? Colin?”
“Yeah. Fifteen years now. Runs the pub.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“I dunno. End of January. When the phones stopped working. He said they were putting a wall up.”
End of January. More than a month ago.