End Times (Book 2): The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  It was late afternoon by the time we made it back to the highway, and not long after that we came to the town of Salmon Gums. After Grass Patch (weird names out here, I gotta say) we were apprehensive, but Salmon Gums looked entirely deserted. We drove through the main road, past silent and empty houses, and then pulled over on the other side.

  “Why have we stopped?” I asked. The sun was sinking in the west, casting our long shadows across the road.

  “Water,” Geoff said. “We’ve got one jerry left.”

  “That’s alright,” Ellie said uneasily. “If we ration it…”

  “We don’t know what might happen on the way to Eucla,” Geoff said. “We need more water. This place looks deserted. It might be our best bet.”

  He was right. Even if he hadn’t been, it was his decision anyway. So we drove around the north side of the town, through some scrubby bushland, and hid the car as best we could in a turn-off. Then we slowly approached the town on foot, from the north, through the back streets, all four of us carrying our rifles locked and loaded.

  Salmon Gums is a tiny, insignificant place. It has maybe thirty houses. But after the relative safety of the endless wheat fields, it felt very big indeed. All those buildings, trees, fences, walls – and behind any one of them could be a trigger-happy stranger.

  We searched the servo first, a faded old BP with a bunch of Peters ice cream signs plastered over it. It was stripped bare, so we moved on to the houses. The place definitely felt deserted, but entering every single one of those buildings was gut-wrenching. It was the silence that did it – my heart jumped into my mouth every time a floorboard creaked, or a branch scraped on a tin roof.

  Eventually we found a house with a rainwater tank out the back. We’ll have to boil it, but we filled three jerry cans. Didn’t find a speck of food, or tools, or anything else useful at all. No violence, either – no blood or bodies or even any broken glass.

  “What do you think happened here?” Aaron said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The sun was setting now, lighting the sky up blood orange. “It feels really…”

  “Mary Celeste,” Ellie said. “Like everyone just up and vanished. Like the rapture happened.”

  “Didn’t someone say Kalgoorlie was meant to be safe?” Aaron said. “Maybe they all went up there. Took everything with them. Like – what was that place near Collie? Mumballup?”

  “Maybe,” I said. But it still didn’t feel right to me.

  “Alright, it’s getting late,” Geoff said, strapping the last jerry can onto the roof rack. “We’ll sleep here tonight. Pick one of the houses. Be good to have a proper bed again.” He must have seen the looks on our faces. “Don’t be ridiculous. They got evacuated or they left. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred people living here. They probably made a decision on their own and all decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere safer.”

  I looked around. A self-sufficient little town, way out at the edge of the Wheatbelt, with only one road running in and out of it… seemed to me that it would be a pretty good place to ride out the apocalypse. Put a barricade up like the people at Collie did, rob anyone who came through until that dried up, then just keep farming. Bob’s your uncle.

  I thought that, but I didn’t say it. Whatever helps the others sleep at night.

  I’m on first watch again, and it’s quiet so far. No ghosts. No zombies. No sign of what I’m really worried about, either, which is a party of strangers with guns driving into town in the middle of the night.

  March 9

  I dreamt about Dad last night, yet again. I’ve been dreaming about him every single night since Albany. Not about what happened – not the blood, not the horror – just the old days, the ordinary days. Him driving us to school, or berating me about homework, or drinking beer and watching footy on the couch on a Saturday arvo. Then when I wake up I have a sick lurch in my stomach when I remember what happened.

  I wish he was here with us.

  We had a breakfast of cold tinned beans, drank our fill from the water tank, and left early in the morning. Geoff was driving again; I was in the passenger seat, Aaron and Ellie in the back.

  We were about half an hour north of Salmon Gums when we were attacked.

  The landscape up here is flat and desolate, but there’s a lot of bushland and gum trees lining the road, so there’s not a lot of visibility. For the half hour north of Salmon Gums the road had been empty, nothing to suggest anything at all had gone wrong with the world – just another lonely Outback highway, same as it had always been.

  Then we started to see things. Bits of scrap metal on the road; clumps of rags; a dead body, ravens scattering into the air as we drove past. A few burnt-out car chassis. Soon there was enough debris on the road that Geoff had to slow right down to about thirty kays an hour, weaving in and out of obstacles.

  It reminded me, very suddenly, of Collie. The little obstacle course of abandoned cars that had been strategically placed to slow us down just as we arrived at the town’s barricade…

  “Geoff,” I said. But he’d already stopped the car. Scattered on the road ahead of us was a perfect cross-hatching of improvised tyre spikes – lengths of plywood or PVC piping with nails driven through them, tangled in long spools of barbed wire. The blacktop was completely covered.

  All of us were scanning the trees on either side of the road. There was no movement. Geoff wound his window down, but there was no sound beyond the idling of the station wagon’s engine.

  “We need to clear it,” Geoff said.

  “We could go around,” Ellie said. “Like we did at the last town.”

  “No. There’s no farmland anymore. No trails.”

  He was right – Salmon Gums was at the edge of it. This was proper Outback country now, just bush and scrubland and salt lakes. You could glimpse it through the trees along either side of the road. This was the only way north.

  “It might be abandoned,” I said. “From a while ago.”

  “Nobody’s cleared it,” Aaron said.

  “Maybe nobody’s been up this way since then. Maybe we’re the first.”

  “Then what happened to the people who set it up?”

  We were whispering. As though anybody could overhear us, sitting in the car. The bitumen ahead was shimmering in the midday sun. All of us were still looking at the trees, looking for any glimpse of colour or movement that might betray an ambush.

  “We need to clear it,” Geoff repeated.

  But he didn’t offer to go.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “I’ll do it. Stay behind the wheel, keep the engine running.”

  “I’ll come with,” Aaron said.

  We stepped out of the car, boots onto the blacktop. The engine was still puttering away, though now I was outside the car I could hear the cicadas singing in the trees as well. The sun immediately went to work burning my exposed skin. I held the Steyr in both hands, big and obvious for anybody who might be watching and weighing up their options. I started walking towards the debris, and Aaron followed a little behind.

  I reached the first tyre-spike. That was when I had to sling the rifle over my back, and hope to hell that Aaron was on the ball if anything happened. I grabbed the plank with both hands and dragged it onto the gravel at the edge of the road. The next one was heavier, snarled with barbed wire, and Aaron moved to help me. “No, no,” I said. “Stay on watch.” Geoff and Ellie waited in the car just a few paces behind us.

  I was dragging the third one when a gunshot rang out.

  I whipped my head around. The windscreen of the station wagon had spiderwebbed; I couldn’t see a thing behind it. The tyres squealed as Geoff kicked it into reverse. Aaron was firing off a burst from his Steyr – and then I was sprinting across the bitumen, running for cover, scrambling for the trees at the side of the road even as I heard more sharp, single gunshots ring out.

  I scraped through the branches, trying to drag the rifle off my back, and suddenly burst out into clear air again. There
was a railway line running parallel to the road – I’d seen glimpses of it through the trees as we’d been driving. I looked north, rifle in hands, and only ten metres away was a man crouched at the edge of the trees, filthy, ragged, something in his hand – just a hatchet, a little hand-axe, and he looked at me in terror and flung it at me and turned to run. It sailed right past my head and he’d turned his back and was fleeing but I was operating on sheer adrenaline now, sheer anger and terror, and I squeezed the trigger and watched him tumble into the dust. I kept moving forward, over the body, scanning the trees. I could hear Aaron’s Steyr rattling somewhere off on the other side of the road, could hear somebody shouting. Every nerve in my body was screaming at me and all I wanted to do was run back towards the car to check on Ellie and Geoff, but this was better, this was the safer way, offence was the best defence…

  Thirty metres up the road, kneeling behind a makeshift blind of dead branches, I found a man fumbling with a bolt-action rifle. He hadn’t seen me; he was looking down at the road. His hands were shaking, he’d spilled bullets all over the gravel as he desperately tried to thumb more into the clip. He looked so pathetic that my first thought was to let him surrender – but then he had the clip in, and Aaron was emerging from the trees from the other side of the road, and he was swinging the rifle around to bear on my brother.

  I shot first, a quick and angry burst, and he slumped forward into the gravel. I looked up at Aaron. His eyes were wide, his breathing quick and heavy. “Other side’s clear,” he said. “All clear, I think…”

  The road was silent again. I looked south, back towards the edge of the tyre spiker barricade, and could see the station wagon had reversed fifty metres back up the road before spinning out at the edge of the gravel and clipping a burnt-out car.

  I started sprinting, rifle in both hands, leaping over the debris on the road. I could see movement at the car, Ellie crouching by the driver’s door, behind the blurry white mess of the shattered windscreen. She suddenly stood and raised her rifle as I approached, but saw it was me, and I ran and hugged her.

  “He’s okay,” she said. “I think he’s okay.”

  Geoff had been a sitting duck. Fortunately for us, the guy with the rifle hadn’t been a crack shot. The bullet had missed him, but had still smashed open the windscreen and his face and neck had been cut by flying glass. He thought he’d been shot and had kicked the car into reverse, to try to get Ellie out of there, but had been half-blind and was still being shot at and had accidentally run it into an abandoned car after fifty metres.

  “You get ‘em?” he murmured. Ellie had dug out the first aid kit and was trying to patch up the slashes on his neck, but a lot of blood was running down his chest and staining his shirt. “Is it safe?”

  “It’s okay. We got them. It’s okay.” Even as I said it I heard a gunshot from further up the road and my blood ran cold – but it was just Aaron, shooting the bodies in the skull, making sure they didn’t come back.

  “How many?” Geoff croaked.

  “Two that I got,” I said. “I don’t know about Aaron.”

  “Make sure it’s clear,” Geoff said, still trying to catch his breath. “Completely clear. I’ll be with you in a sec.”

  I went back up with Aaron and we checked the bushland on both sides of the road again. Then we checked the bodies.

  There’d been only three of them, all men, with ragged clothes and scruffy beards, in their thirties and forties. Only one of them had had a rifle, and that was just a .22, with only ten rounds left after the few that he’d let off at us. The one I’d killed had been carrying a little hatchet; Aaron said another had come at him from the bushes with a machete.

  We found their camp a bit further up the road, hidden away on the other side of the railway. A few tarps strung over some branches, three swags, a sad little shopping cart with some tinned food and bottles of water in it. “How do you reckon they got out here?” Aaron said.

  “I dunno. They must have had a car at first. We saw plenty of broken-down ones on the way up here. Or maybe they were walking. I guess it’s not that far.” I was already worried that we were going to have to walk to Eucla; something had ruptured one of the station wagon’s tyres as Geoff reversed away, and we didn’t have a spare.

  Aaron had only shot the body of the guy with the rifle; he said he’d already been stirring. I went back to the guy who’d thrown the hatchet at me, looked around in the dead leaves and sticks beneath the gum trees until I found it, then sank it into his head.

  “What’s the deal with the numbers, you reckon?” Aaron said.

  “The what?”

  “The number tattoos. On their hands.”

  I hadn’t noticed it before, but all three of them had ink numbers tattooed onto the backs of their hands: 247, 248 and 306. “I dunno,” I said. “Gang tattoos or something? Who cares?”

  We went back to the car. Geoff had a patchwork of plaster tape over his neck and face now, and – more worryingly – a whole patch of gauze over his right eye. “It should be okay,” Ellie said. “I mean… I hope. I think some glass just grazed his eyelid. Thought it would probably be better to just keep it shut for a bit.”

  Geoff himself was down on the bitumen, inspecting the ragged mess the left rear tyre had become. “There’s other cars back down the road,” I said. “Some of them still had tyres…”

  “That’s not the only problem,” Geoff muttered. “Cracked the rear diff when we went into the ditch. Something must be up with the gearbox as well, ‘cause it’s pissing oil.” He sighed. “Old cars. Easy to hotwire, easy to break. You find anything on those assholes? Tools or parts or anything?”

  “Nah,” I said. “So, what? It’s fucked?”

  He stood up and looked back down the road. “All those breakdowns and chassis and shit, they all looked stripped to me. Even if we found anything… I don’t know. It would take a long time. It might be better to just walk to Norseman and try to pick up something else.”

  “Walk?” I said in disbelief.

  “It’s only fifty kays, and it’s flat,” he said. “We could do it at dusk, and dawn. Carry the food and water. I honestly don’t think this thing’s going anywhere.”

  He checked the cars down the road anyway, but only confirmed his suspicions. We went and got the little shopping cart our ambushers had been using and loaded it up with the water. Then we waited for the sun to get lower and the heat of the day to die down.

  We did a weapons tally while we were waiting. Between us, Aaron and I fired off 23 shots. I didn’t think it had been that many, but I guess in the heat of combat it can get away from you. The .22 one of them had is a fairly plain, wooden-stock Ruger which Geoff said is pretty common to find out in the country. We have seven guns now, even if the handguns are basically dry. Nearly two each. More than I ever thought I’d see in my life. But I guess the country is like a whole other… well. Country.

  Why did he wait, before shooting at Geoff? Why did he wait for me to clear the tyre spikers? Was he unsure? Hesitating? Two people with rifles, how many more in the car – was that what he was thinking? Weighing up the risks and benefits? Wondering whether to just let us on by?

  I guess they were desperate. I would have been, too, out here at the edge of the highway, only a few cans and bottles of water left, with Christ knows how long until the next car comes along.

  I wish they’d decided not to. I wish they’d let us go on through, decided we were too risky, stayed silent in the trees. I keep thinking about the look in that man’s face, the bug-eyed terror, seeing me come out of the trees with a rifle in my hands. The despair of throwing his shitty little hatchet at me, then turning to run. I wish they’d just let us drive on by.

  But then I guess they would have tried to hurt somebody else. Somebody weaker.

  March 10

  We started walking a couple of hours before sunset, once it cooled down a bit. I wanted to walk along the railway track, out of sight of the road, but dragging the shopping
trolley (jammed full of precious jerry cans of water) through the gravel was too difficult. So we stayed on the blacktop: me and Aaron taking turns at pushing the trolley, Geoff and Ellie keeping an eye ahead of us and an eye behind, so that if we saw a car coming we’d have time to scramble into the treeline.

  Nobody came along anyway. Not a single car.

  It felt crazy, to be trudging through the Outback on foot. Everything I’ve been told my entire life says to stay put, stay with the car, set off your EPIRB, wait for the SES or the cops. But we don’t have any of those things anymore. We can’t call the RAC. So we walk.

  Around sunset we spotted a small crowd of zombies, crouching around a dead body at the edge of the road. Feeding. There were maybe a dozen of them; they soon saw us and started stumbling towards us across the gravel at the shoulder of the road, screeching and moaning. We began picking them off with the rifles. The last few made it within about five metres, and I dropped my gun to take the last one out with the hatchet. There’s something disturbing about a bunch of them coming towards you like that, moaning their lungs out. You feel like you have all the time and the space in the world but there’s this panicky instinct telling you to cut and run the whole time.

  At least we’re out here, out in the open, where we can cut and run, if we have to. We don’t have a car or much food or water, but we have space, and maybe that’s the most important thing when our only fundamental advantage over them is intelligence and speed. There are people – there must still be, right now, even as I write this - who are trying to survive in places like New York and London and Hong Kong. Imagine having to deal with millions of these fucking things, in tight little streets and alleyways and corridors. Compare that to out here, out in the desert. I’ve never felt more glad to be Australian.

  We kept going for a good hour after the sun went down, in the twilight, until it was too dark to see. Then we dragged the cart across the railway line and into the scrub, a few hundred metres from the road. Our breath was misting and I was shivering. Geoff refused to let us light a fire, and I was inclined to agree, as much as I wanted one. We hadn’t seen any cars go past all day, but better safe than sorry.