by Shane Carrow
“Didn’t exactly get a guided tour.”
“Right,” Angus said. “But let me guess. Empty streets? Very quiet? Bit of a ghost town?”
“Well… yeah,” I admitted.
“Exactly,” he said, polishing the scope on a Winchester. “That’s what it was like when I was there, and that was yonks ago. They’re not as fucking strong as they look. The slaves outnumber them, easy. We got more guns than people here, you know that? We got lucky. We had a couple of Reserves come through from the fucking catastrophe that was the Perth evacuation, and they had plenty with them, and we got a bloke here who used to be a cop in Northam and cleaned out the station’s gun cage before he went on the run. We’ve got, like, three guns for every man.”
“Is that why you gave my brother his Glock back?”
“Sort of. Mostly just ‘cause I just admired his guts. Anyway, the point is – we get a foot in that door, we find where the slaves are… I mean, what would you have done? Three days ago? If someone had thrown open that roller door and dragged you out of that shitty little concrete box, and put a gun in your hands and said, “We’re on your side, we’re taking this place?’”
I would have immediately tried to get away, I thought. Even if I looked like I was trying to help. Even if I looked like I was on your side. I would have been looking for the exit.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I would have been pretty stoked with that.” Which wasn’t technically a lie.
Angus grinned at me. “They won’t know what hit ‘em, mate.”
“When’s this happening?”
“Tomorrow night,” he said. “The guys we caught said they’re going to be sending their main force out tomorrow, setting up somewhere out near Boorabin. So we just go into Kal a few hours after they leave.”
“Right,” I said.
“Want to come?” Angus said. He was still grinning. He was genuinely excited by it, I saw – not worried or frightened or anxious. Excited.
But it had been a sincere question. He was asking me to join them.
“Uh…” I said.
“Ah, it’s alright,” he said. “You don’t have to. We need people back here, too. Look after the kids, the sick, the injured. Got to keep the home fires burning, you know?”
“Whatever you think is a good idea,” I said. “I just… I don’t know. I’ve, uh, been through a lot, you know…”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, mate, that’s alright. I’ve been there. They put a number on my hand too, remember? I thought they’d broken me. They didn’t – but it takes time. It takes time to deal with it. And Christ, you’re just a kid. You’re a tough kid, you and your brother both. This had happened to me when I was eighteen, I’d probably still be bawling my fucking eyes out. You’re alright, Matt. You’ve got what it takes.”
I looked into his eyes – it was still there, that weird glint, that good-guy smile with an unstable edge to it. I thought they’d broken me, he’d said, except clearly they had, even if he didn’t realise it, because there was something about him that was just that little bit off-kilter.
And in spite of all that part of me felt proud. Part of me felt pleased that he’d asked me to come, and that he thought I was tough. Because I respected him. Because, in spite of being a little bit crazy, a little bit broken by all the fucked up shit that’s happened in the last three months, he’s also, fundamentally, a good person. Behind that ragged beard and those gleaming eyes, there’s the soul of a good man.
Unless I’m going crazy too. Unless – what was it, not even a fortnight? – a fortnight of mental torture and slavery drove me insane, and now I just see the best in anyone who isn’t actively trying to hurt me.
I thought of Tom again. I thought of all the other dead prisoners caught in the crossfire at the construction site. Angus hadn’t even given their bodies a second glance. The only reason me and Aaron had survived was sheer luck.
“That patrol you caught out on the highway,” I said. “What did you do to them? After they told you what you wanted to know.”
“We shot ‘em,” Angus shrugged.
I’d already know that, but it didn’t matter. It was the casual way he said it. Like describing any other chore. We took the bins out. We washed the car. We shot ‘em.
“You don’t approve,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. Kept cleaning out the chambers of a revolver, looking down at my work.
“That’s alright,” Angus said. “I understand. I don’t like it, it’s not an easy thing. But they’re scum, Matt. All of them. Look at your hand. They did that to you.”
And I did – I did look at my hand, looked at the ugly little number scored into the flesh. 552. That’s me. Forever.
“They’re scum,” Angus repeated. “All of them. Don’t shed any tears for them.”
I thought about the young guard, the first one killed back at the construction site, who’d been kneeling down to give a prisoner a drink of water. I thought about my own dad, who’d been conscripted into the Albany militia against his will, caught up in events he couldn’t control, guarding the walls against an onslaught of refugees that included his own sons.
“Yeah,” I said. “Nah, yeah. I know.”
“Like I said,” Angus went on, “I don’t like it. But we do what we gotta do.”
That was the end of our conversation. We kept cleaning guns. We finished before the dinner bell, just after sundown, and I went and found Aaron. The two of sat down by the symphony of frogs at the edge of the star-splattered lake, eating lukewarm cans of beans.
“Not tonight,” I told him. “Tomorrow night. They’re planning an attack on Kalgoorlie. A lot of them will be leaving. We should go then.”
“How many of them?”
“I dunno. Most – that was the impression I got.”
“What about cars, then?” Aaron said. “Won’t they take most of them?”
I thought about the keys to the Triton, still guiltily hidden in my pocket. It’s a modern model, late 2000s. Not easy to hotwire. Maybe not even possible to hotwire, for all I know. When did immobilisers come into play? 2000? Somewhere around then. “Not if they can’t start them,” I said.
The frogs croaked away. Aaron went down to the edge of the lake to wash his enamel camping plate out, and then came and sat back beside me. “I don’t like it,” he said eventually. “It’s risky.”
“What choice do we have?” I snapped. “You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said.
But I could tell he didn’t really mean that. He doesn’t really believe Eucla will be there. He doesn’t think Ellie and Geoff and the others made it out of Norseman safely. His focus has shrunk to here and now: this little camp of a hundred people on the shores of a muddy lake in the bush at the edge of the Outback.
“Aaron,” I said, “I know you don’t think everything will be okay if we go to Eucla. I don’t really think that either. I don’t think it’s the fucking promised land. But what I do know is that this, here, right now? This is fucked. Kalgoorlie is fifty kays over the horizon. That place still exists. We aren’t free of that, not while we’re here. And I definitely don’t want to go on some fucking dumbshit guerrilla warfare campaign for justice or vengeance or whatever the fuck Angus is on about, and get caught again. I want to put a thousand fucking miles between us and Kalgoorlie. We need to get the fuck out of here. Okay? We need to get the fuck out of here.”
Aaron nodded, although he still wasn’t looking at me – just staring out over the lake. “Yeah. No, yeah. You’re right.”
“We have to stick together,” I said. “Okay? That’s still true, that’s always gonna be true. It’s you and me. We have to stick together.”
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “Of course. We’ll be okay, Matt.”
The last time I’d said that to him had been in the office, in Perth, right after he nearly got himself killed going off hunting for a radio by himself. When he’d responded then I’d looked into his eyes
and known that he was behind me – 100%, backing me to the hilt, would never let me down.
I still think that. But this time he didn’t look at me. I could feel him hesitating. Just a little bit.
We have to get out of here.
March 30
9.00pm
Angus and his crew left an hour after dusk. He gave a speech first, all fire and brimstone, talking about bringing back the rule of law and raining vengeance down upon the monsters in Kalgoorlie.
Even for a sceptic like me, a man with a stolen pair of keys in my pocket, it struck a nerve. Because he’s right. How long did I spend in the concrete box in Kalgoorlie, or sweating away in a trench under the sun with a gun-toting guard looking down on me, just dreaming of the day when we could rise up and strike back?
Maybe, for me, it’s just that survival outweighs vengeance. Fear outweighs fury. I want to kill every single one of those fuckers in Kalgoorlie – but not enough that I’d ever dream of risking my freedom again, ever dream of going anywhere near the place for the rest of my life.
Anyway, it played well with the crowd. I guess a lot of them still have loved ones in Kalgoorlie. That’s the worst part; that’s what makes me feel guilty. Angus might have a screw loose but he’s not fundamentally wrong. He’s doing the right thing. He’s literally a freedom fighter.
He might get all his men killed, but that’s beside the point. Nobody’s forcing them to do it.
I noticed Neville and Jamie, rescued from the work site alongside us, were amongst his little crowd of warriors. And when I say little, I mean little. I counted 44 men and women. Granted, they’re a well-armed 44 men and women, but for all of Kalgoorlie’s quiet streets I always got the impression there were at least several thousand people alive and well there. But then, they did say that a lot of them were heading west to try to take out the oncoming zombie horde. But then, who’s “they”? Angus? From a captured patrol? Who knows what the truth is?
Christ. I don’t know. All I know is that I want to be shot of here, out of this, back to Ellie and Geoff. I’m surprised by how much I miss Geoff as well as Ellie. Even if he never liked me, even if he was a gruff old dickhead, he was so capable. So in control.
That was what I’d wanted, going south to find Dad. An adult. Someone to just take over and tell me what to do. I’m tired of having to figure out what to do. I’m eighteen years old and I’m tired.
I’m rambling. I’m just writing now, sitting down by the lake in the moonlight, waiting to pretend to go to bed. The Triton keys are in my pocket – they didn’t take it, I noticed, probably precisely because they couldn’t find the keys. Took just about everything else, though. There’s only a few cars left, apart from the camper vans and Winnebagos people are sleeping in.
A few hours. A few hours, and we’re gone. What are we? Eight hours away from Eucla? We could be there that quick.
But it’s a bit like… whathishname, you know. The box, with a cat in it. We learned about it in school but I forget. The fear of the unknown. Until you open the box, the cat might be alive or dead. You don’t know until you open it. You can’t know.
Eucla has been my fantasy for weeks now – weeks that feel like years. What happens if we get there and it’s not at all like I think? What if it’s abandoned? What if it’s burned to the ground? What if it’s full of survivors but they say, sorry, never heard of Ellie or Geoff, be on your way, please?
What if we can’t even get there because there’s a dozen hostile towns between us and them?
There’s no point scribbling all this out. I’m going to go skim rocks for a while.
March 31
I spent hours lying in my sleeping bag, staring up at the sky. I could tell Aaron was wide awake beside me. We’d agreed on one o’clock in the morning. This time a few months ago I’d still be wide awake at one o’clock, playing video games and smoking weed, to sleep in until noon the next day before going to the beach. Now that we mostly sleep and rise with the sun – and now that we never get enough to eat – I feel tired more quickly, go to sleep earlier. But I wasn’t about to fall asleep. Not tonight.
At one o’clock I reached over and nudged Aaron. He sat up slowly and quietly, pulled his boots on. We rolled up the sleeping bags but didn’t bother with the mats – too cumbersome. Neither of us spoke. We knew what we were doing.
Patchwork clouds had drifted in earlier in the night, blocking most of the light from the stars and the crescent moon. There was no light in the camp apart from the glow of torchlight from inside a few tents. We picked our way along the edge, between the lake and some of the outlying caravans. There was no sound but the night chorus of frogs and insects.
The sentries were usually posted to the north and west, which was the direction, eventually, of the highway. That was during normal times, though - not when Angus took off with half the population of the camp. But we weren’t doing anything wrong. Not yet.
We reached what I thought of as the “car yard” – past Brian’s dilapidated old caravan, there was an empty space where most of the camp’s vehicles had been just a few hours ago. We walked quietly, carefully, heading straight for the Mitsubishi Triton parked underneath a dead gum tree on the far side.
“Matt?”
I froze. Turned around. There was an old ute with its bonnet up, a tiny gleaming light in the darkness – someone with one of those dorky elastic LED head torches. It was Brian, standing over the engine, spanner in hand, looking astonished to see us there.
“What are you doing?” he said.
I glanced at Aaron, who had a hand reaching behind his back. From that angle I couldn’t see and neither could Brian, but I knew he was reaching for the Glock tucked in the back of his belt – not pulling it out, not yet, but resting his hand on it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Brian looked down. “Fixing the engine,” he mumbled.
“It’s one in the morning,” I said.
Brian glared at me. “So what are you doing?”
I glanced over at Aaron. “We’re leaving,” I whispered, looking warily back towards the camp. It didn’t seem like anyone could hear us. “Angus is going to get everyone killed. We just want to get out of here.”
The little point of LED light bobbed slightly; Brian nodding, agreeing with me. “I know. It’s not safe. Cara says it’s not safe. But there’s no cars. They took everything. I’m trying to get this bloody thing going but it’s rooted…”
He looked miserable, with his little headlamp and his leg brace. I looked at Aaron again. “Brian,” I said, “you can come with us. You and Cara and…” I tried and failed to remember his sister’s kid’s name. “…the baby. We’ve got the keys to the Triton.”
“We lost the keys to the Triton,” Brian said uncertainly.
“I found them,” I said. White lies don’t hurt anyone. “If I’d known you wanted to leave as well I would have asked you. I didn’t know you wanted to leave, OK? But we can all go, all of us. Right?”
There was so much relief in his face I could have cried. We went with him as he hobbled back to the caravan, quietly fetched his family. I’d met Cara once in the dinner line – a stocky country girl in her early twenties, with a three-month old baby. She must have been unlucky enough to give birth right when all of this started happening. I hadn’t asked what had happened to the rest of their family.
The plan was to put the Triton in neutral and push it along the edge of the lake. It was summer and the water levels were way down, so there was a nice expanse of flat, dried, cracked mud. That way we could get it at least a few kilometres away before we started the engine, and hopefully nobody back in the camp would hear us. Then we could take off down on of the dozens of trails through the scrub, head south or south-east, away from here, away from Kalgoorlie - find our way back to Route 94 and head for the Nullarbor.
In practice that meant me and Aaron pushing, since Brian had a bad leg and Cara had a baby to hold - and Christ, how terrified I was that that baby migh
t wake up at any second and start crying. Brian sat behind the wheel, steering us around rocks and dead branches, while me and Aaron huffed and puffed our way along behind the tray. It was hard work but encouraging – every time I glanced over my shoulder the camp was further and further away. We were making it.
We were probably only five hundred metres along the lake when Brian suddenly decided to fire up the engine. “What the fuck!” I hissed, and was about to run up to the driver’s door and tell him to kill it – but he took off.
The rear wheels spun, breaking through the crust and spraying Aaron and me with mud, but then it was off and away, rumbling along, shifting through the gears. Aaron had already clambered to his feet and was sprinting after it; I’d slipped again, and was a second behind him. I felt terrible panic, watching those tail-lights take off – but then Brian hit a wet patch or something, got bogged momentarily, rooster-tails of mud making the red lights flicker. I glanced over my shoulder; back at the camp I could see lights coming on and hear someone shouting.
Aaron had made it to the ute and grabbed the edge of the tray, scrambling into the back as Brian took off again. He turned around and reached out a hand for me, even as the ute picked up speed. I put on a final burst, sprinting, reached and lunged forward...
...and Aaron had me, gripping me around the wrist, my boots scrambling and dragging along the ground. He tried to haul me up into the ute but our arms were coated in wet mud and I felt myself slipping, sliding down his arm, hearing him scream my name as I fell into the mud and the wind was knocked out of me.
I scrambled onto my hands and knees, wheezing for breath. I looked back at the camp, could hear distant shouts, dogs barking, a party of men coming along the lakeside. I pulled myself up and started to run, gasping for air, chasing a futile pair of dwindling red tail lights.
Aaron was onboard the ute. Aaron had a gun. That was what I was thinking of.
As I ran I heard a gunshot, heard distant screaming, saw the tail lights come to a stop. Then it wasn’t the red tail lights but the white head lights, coming towards me, V8 engine roaring...