End Times (Book 2): The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  I glanced at Aaron. “So…” I said. “What are you guys doing? Where are you taking us?”

  He twisted in his seat again, stared right at me with a grin on his face. “Mate, we’re taking you to freedom. This is the day you get to start fighting back.”

  Aaron and I looked at each other again. We didn’t say anything because we didn’t need to. We were both thinking about what we’d seen as we came out of the trench: a clearing of corpses. Other prisoners, caught in the crossfire.

  We drove for maybe an hour, which wasn’t very good for judging distance since most of it was on dirt roads through bushland – in any case, my mental map around Kalgoorlie was pretty fuzzy. This was never a place, when we’d been fleeing Albany, that we’d intended to come. The bushland near the highway started to change, replaced by a sort of savannah landscape – then it was just scrubland and desert. We were driving down the flank of a huge, muddy lake, with no sign of life but a few crows flapping above us, shrieking and cawing.

  Their camp was on the shores of the lake – a rag-tag collection of tents, dilapidated caravans, Winnebagos, even a few of the Army tents I’d seen around Manjimup and Albany. I noticed immediately they had no campfires. “Aren’t you worried they’ll see you from the air?” I asked.

  Angus snorted in contempt. “They don’t have planes.”

  I’d heard a helicopter for sure when we’d been in the storage unit in Kalgoorlie. Or had that been my imagination?

  The camp was a livelier place than I’d seen in a while. When we’d been dragged through the streets of Kalgoorlie they’d been practically deserted – curfews, work duty, maybe just general fear – but here there were children running around, people talking to their neighbours. Aaron and I followed Angus into the centre of the camp.

  “Just got to debrief,” Angus explained. “We need to know what you know, you know? Then we’ll get you some grub and a place to sleep.”

  That sounded fine to me, even if I already had my eye on the door.

  We were taken into a big Army tent along with the other three prisoners who’d been rescued. Neither me nor Aaron had any idea if we’d ever spoken to them before – the Kalgoorlie system had a way of forcing your head down, and whatever conversations you had were muttered whispers to strangers in the pitch black of a storage unit. But we learned their names now - all of us were asked to record our names, ages, and former occupations in the new ledger. It reminded me horribly of Kalgoorlie, except this time I didn’t have my hands tied behind my back.

  We told our stories to the man sitting behind the ledger, anyway. And we listened to the others. Neville Young, 30, labourer from Marvel Loch. He and his wife and son taken when they tried to go to Kalgoorlie for safety. Shaun Grimwood, 35, from Corrigin, taken alone in an ambush on the Great Eastern Highway while escaping undead siege and final collapse of said hometown. Jamie Ericsson, 20, from Carrabin, both himself and his sister taken as captives when they arrived at Kalgoorlie a month ago, having heard on the radio it was a safe zone – fleeing towards the desert, trustingly, hopefully.

  The ledgerman closed his book. In the shadows of the tent his face was cast in gloom. We could still heard the sounds of the camp in the late afternoon outside. Jamie was crying; Neville had stood up and was pacing back and forth, the vestigial chain still clinking at his wrist.

  The ledgerman held his hand out. His number was 77. “This is a safe place,” he said. “Well… safer. I won’t say all of us – it’s not all of us – but a lot of us have been through what you’ve been through. We escaped. We made it out. We’re never going back. But we’re not going to forget the people who are still there, either.”

  “My sister’s still there,” Jamie said hollowly. “I’m not… We can’t just leave people there.”

  “We’re not going to,” the ledgerman said.

  “You think they’re still there?” Neville said. “They took my wife. Took my little boy. Why would they…” He trailed off.

  “They don’t kill people,” the ledgerman said. “Not if they can use them. They still have my son, too. His name’s Oscar. We’re not going to forget them.”

  He held out his hand to Neville, who clasped it. Then Jamie put a hand on, too. Then Shaun – the one who had no friends or partner, nobody to go back for, but I guess he didn’t have anywhere else to run to either. Aaron and I glanced at each other, then added our hands onto the pile. Go team! I could feel my stomach sinking.

  “They’re fucked,” the ledgerman said. “They think they can treat people like this, they think they can take us back to the Dark Ages? Not in my fucking country. I don’t care what else is happening, this is still Australia. We don’t treat people like this. Well, we’re fighting back. We’re getting stronger every day. We’re going to free the rest and we’re going to kill the bastards who did this to us. We’re going to win.”

  I was glancing over at Aaron again – thinking about the sheer numbers in Kalgoorlie, compared to this scrappy little camp out in the desert.

  After that we were taken to a caravan, given food. They don’t have campfires (for the reason I’d assumed – visible smoke) but they still have gas cookers, and can warm up plenty of tins of beans, tinned fruit, tinned beef... whatever kind of tin you might want. (Even in the worst, darkest moments of captivity in Kalgoorlie, I would sometimes just dream about good food.) Still, it was better than we’d eaten in weeks. They get the water from the lake, apparently; muddy as it is, they can strain it and then boil it. Tastes gritty as fuck but it’s better than nothing.

  They have no spare indoor sleeping quarters, but Aaron and I were given a pair of sleeping mats, thermal underwear, shitloads of blankets and North Face branded sleeping bags. Angus came to visit us again, dropping them off. “If it rains, you boys feel free to run into the nearest caravan,” he grinned. “But I reckon you’ll be right.” Up ahead, the stars were coming out in the twilight. It probably rains out here four or five days a year.

  Before going to bed we took a walk down the lake. I kept picking at the tightly-hewn chain around my wrist and the chafed skin beneath it – nobody had bothered to remove it and I hadn’t asked. “What do you reckon?” Aaron whispered.

  “I dunno,” I said. “I don’t get the impression we’re free to leave. Or even if we are… well, fuck, what are we gonna do? Walk to Eucla?”

  Aaron nodded. “A lot of the people here… I don’t know. They’ve either got people back in Kal, or they want to fight for revenge. We’re in the minority. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that we’d have anywhere else to go.”

  “I just want to get out of here,” I said. “Get to Eucla.”

  Aaron stood by the edge of the mud. The moon had risen, casting a shimmering bar of reflection across the water. Frogs and insects were chirping in the rushes.

  “Eucla might not be there,” he said. “Eucla might have fallen. Ellie and her dad might be anywhere.”

  I stared down at the shallows, watching baby marron squirting about. “Maybe. But we still have to try to find them.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “Yeah, I know. I’ll back that.” He glanced back at the camp. “That leaves the problem of how we get out of here.”

  I sighed. “It’s been a long day. Maybe we should just get some sleep. Whatever happens, we’re in a better position than yesterday.”

  “You can fucking say that again.”

  We went back to our sleeping pads, wrapped ourselves up, stared at the stars and tried to sleep. But I still keep thinking of Tom. Poor fucking Tom.

  And us. Eighteen years old today. Will we make it to nineteen?

  March 28

  The sun rose over a misty lake, the night-time chorus of croaking frogs giving way to the trilling of magpies. After a breakfast of tinned pork and beans, we were tracked down by the ledgerman, who wanted us to expound upon our skills. Aaron and I had told him we were both students, and that Aaron’s skills had drifted towards English while mine were more Mech Workshop; accordingly, Aaron was s
ent to do the post-breakfast washing up while I was sent to what they called the “car yard.”

  It wasn’t much of one. A dozen sedans and station wagons. The mechanic was a bloke named Brian with his leg in a brace, which is why I assumed he was on car duty instead of out on patrol or exploratory missions with the others. I was finding that here in the camp, my eyes were immediately drawn to people’s left hands. Brian had no number tattoo.

  “So what’s your story?” I asked, as we started salvaging a knackered Commodore for parts.

  “Oh, nothing special,” he said. “Me sister’s here, and her baby. Her boyfriend didn’t make it. We ran into those things on the Great Eastern and went off-road, ended up here. Never ended up in Kal like the rest of them.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  We worked for the rest of the day, making small talk, stripping down the Commodore and storing its parts, working on some of the other vacant vehicles. Brian struck me as a bit weird; mild autism or Asperger’s, or maybe just a bit slow. Fine by me. I slipped the keys for a Triton ute into my pocket when he wasn’t looking.

  “Tonight,” I whispered to Aaron later as we were lying in our sleeping bags down by the lakebed. “Don’t go to sleep. We’re leaving tonight.”

  “Already?” he said.

  “The fuck do you mean?”

  “We just got here. We don’t even know the place yet.”

  “What’s to know?” I said. “Who cares? The sooner we get out of here the better.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You think it’s safe?”

  He was scared. I could feel it coming off him. He didn’t feel guilty, which I did – if only a little bit. He just felt scared.

  “Hey,” I said. “Listen. They don’t suspect a thing. The car yard’s at the edge of camp. We go out there in the middle of the night, stick it in neutral, push it a few hundred metres and then we go. We’ll be on the Nullarbor by the time they realise we’re gone.”

  Aaron didn’t say anything.

  “Aaron. I need you with me on this.”

  He shifted slightly in his sleeping bag. “I’ll do whatever you decide.”

  “Good,” I said. “Go to sleep if you want to. I’ll wake you up. We leave tonight.”

  March 29

  1.00am

  Gunfire at midnight. I sat bolt upright; so did Aaron. Neither of us had weapons. We heard more gunshots, some screaming, from the north of the camp. We scrambled out of our bags, pulled our boots on, prepared ourselves for yet another flight out into the cold, empty bushland.

  False alarm, as it turned out. Well - not exactly. Half a dozen zombies had stumbled up into the northern perimeter. The sentries had put them down without anyone getting hurt, but it still woke up the entire camp and sent everybody into a frenzy. Angus – who, I’m realising now, is the de facto leader of this whole little resistance settlement – stood in the centre of the crowd, trying to calm everyone down.

  “Zombies!” he yelled. “Just a couple of zombies! Nothing we haven’t seen before! Nothing to worry about, Kalgoorlie hasn’t found us, they don’t know about us. Back to sleep, everyone. Just a couple of zombies, we put ‘em down as soon as they showed up. Nothing to worry about. Back to sleep, everyone, come on, nothing to see...”

  People slowly began to disperse. Aaron and I stood there in the midst of the crowd, sleeping bags still wrapped around ourselves against the cold. I wasn’t sure what to think.

  Angus was walking through the crowd, stopping to talk and reassure people. “Angus!” I said. “What the hell? How do zombies end up out here?”

  He paused. “Ah, not the first time it’s happened. Two million people in Perth, right? Another two hundred thousand in the Whealtbelt. They’re catching up. Doesn’t matter how far you run.”

  He still had that look in his eyes, that grin on his face. Outback mystic. Everything will be fine, trust Uncle Angus, everything’s under control.

  “So, what, this happens a lot?” Aaron said.

  “Once a week or so,” Angus shrugged. “Not a big deal. They’re not hordes, not like you’d see back west. Just in their ones and twos, or little groups. Nothing we can’t handle. You head back to sleep, okay?”

  “I want my gun back,” Aaron said.

  “Hmm?” Angus said.

  Aaron pointed at the handgun strapped to Angus’ thigh. “The Glock. You took that off one of the guards, back when you rescued us. The young guy, the first one you shot. While he was giving water to someone.”

  Angus narrowed his eyes, shifted his head. “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s mine,” Aaron said. “I took it off a zombie ages ago. When we were running from Perth. Carried it with me all the way. They took it off me when we got caught but I guess they gave it to that guy. Well, you killed him, you took it, now you have it. I didn’t say anything yesterday because I was just happy for us to be free. But if you’ve got zombies rocking up in the middle of the night? Fuck that. I want a gun. I want that gun. It’s mine. I want it back.”

  I bit my tongue; I wasn’t sure how Angus would react. Part of me wanted to tell Aaron to shut the fuck up, but part of me was egging him on. Part of me was proud, and not a little surprised, that he’d make a demand like that. And part of me knew that this was our chance to gauge how much leeway people like us had in this place.

  Angus tilted his head, looking down at my brother curiously, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. It wasn’t like he needed the Glock; he had another handgun shoved into the back of his belt, a Steyr Aug over his shoulder, a six-inch knife on his right hip. He was six and a half feet of pure muscle and experience, towering over Aaron, a malnourished teenage stick figure wrapped in a sleeping bag and still trembling in the cold of a desert night.

  There was the other argument, too – I could feel that coming off Angus even as he weighed the decision. From each according to his experience. There were a lot of men in this camp, and we were just kids, really.

  But in the end he pulled the Glock from his holster and handed it to Aaron. “Only got the one clip,” he said. “Don’t spend it all at once. You sure you know how to use it?”

  “Like I said, I’ve used it before,” Aaron said. He took the clip out, put it in his pocket, and tucked the unloaded gun into the waistband of his jeans.

  “Hmmm,” Angus said. “Don’t make me regret that. Off to bed with both of you.” And he took his leave of us, moving on to the last few people who were still up and talking, doing his best to reassure them about sentries and patrols and the general dispersion pattern of two million undead West Australians.

  “How did you know that was our Glock?” I asked, as we trudged back to our sleeping mats by the edge of the lake.

  “The scratches on it,” he said. “I’ve spent long enough staring at the fucking thing.”

  I’d called it “our” Glock, and I’ve certainly used it just as much as him – I still remember staring down that psychopath Liam for it after the shitstorm in Manjimup. But that time’s gone. Aaron’s older than me by a few minutes, but in a sense I was always more like the older brother – more capable, more confident, not smarter but maybe wiser. When we were on the long road south to Albany, I was scared about what would happen to him if something happened to me. Maybe he was too.

  I don’t feel like I need to worry about that any more. And I don’t have the right to ask first dibs on a gun any more either. Aaron knows how to take care of himself. He’s a changed person. Which, these days, is undoubtedly a good thing – even if it makes me a little sad.

  7.00pm

  As small as the zombie incursion was, our plans for a quiet escape were obviously scuppered. Everybody else was too highly strung. There were too many people moving about camp for the rest of the night.

  The next morning Aaron was once again on kitchen duty, and I told him to slip away whatever bits of food he might manage. I was back to the car yard with Brian, who hadn’t even noticed the Triton’s keys were missing. We spent most of the day t
rying to get a Mitsubishi flatbed up and running, before Angus eventually came and fetched me midafternoon for a different kind of job.

  It was in one of the Army tents, the big ones with heaps of floor space that I’d last seen around Albany. Inside, half a dozen men were cleaning and oiling a small arsenal of firearms. “You know how to do this, right?” Angus said.

  I nodded. It was relatively easy – Ellie had shown me plenty of times. If you know how to take a gun apart you pretty much know how to clean it, too. Angus gave me a rag and some kit and we set about it. There were the farm rifles, mostly Remingtons and Winchesters. Handguns – a lot of revolvers, some Glocks, a Browning or two. They had half a dozen Army issue Steyr Augs. And there was the odd puzzle – like a semi-automatic AR-15, the kind of gun you always hear about being used in mass shootings in the US, although even that was less unusual than the fully automatic AK-47 that had turned up from God knows where.

  “So what’s this all about?” I asked, making conversation while I evaluated whether or not I’d be able to slip a handgun away without anyone noticing. Not likely.

  “Priming up for the big day,” Angus said. “Our patrols caught one of their patrols this morning, out on the highway. They say there’s a horde coming up from Perth, from the Wheatbelt. Thousands of the fucking things. Kalgoorlie’s gonna send a whole bunch of blokes out west to intercept it. I don’t know what they’re going to try to do – burn it, bomb it, whatever – but it means they’ll be letting their guard down on the home front. That’s our chance. Not gonna get a better one.”

  I glanced around the gloom of the tent, at half a dozen men patiently cleaning firearms. “What, just…”

  “Nah,” Angus said. “This is cleaning detail. We got about fifty fighters. Not a lot, I know, but if their numbers in Kalgoorlie are down, could be our lucky day.”

  “How many do they have?” I asked.

  “You tell me. You were there more recently than the rest of us.”