End Times (Book 2): The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  It didn’t look like the glass was about to break, but more and more zombies were piling up against it.

  “No, no, there won’t be enough to block it,” Colin said. “We’re just attracting them. Come on. Get out of sight, stay quiet, maybe they’ll go back to the pub.”

  We moved into the darkness of the police station together, the sound of the gunshots from the roof or the zombies moaning outside the door becoming more muffled as we headed into the main office. The Eucla police station isn’t exactly Scotland Yard; one room in from the entrance desk and Colin led us to the radio, on a table next to Sergeant Varley’s desk. He sat down and pulled the headphones on, fiddling with the dials and squinting at a piece of paper taped to the wall, scanning down the list for the Mundrabilla Roadhouse frequency.

  “You reckon we can find the key to the weapons cage?” I asked Aaron, slotting fresh bullets into the revolver.

  “The what?”

  “That’s where the M4s are. Two of them at least, three if Varley wasn’t carrying his on patrol. Oi, Colin, where do you reckon the key to the weapons cage is?”

  “Don’t bother,” Colin said, without looking up from the radio. “Varley keeps it on him.”

  “Oh, of course he fucking does,” I said. “Is there a spare?”

  “Hey,” Aaron said. “What was that? Shut up a second.”

  We stood still and listened, Colin still fiddling with the dials, the sound of the undead pressing up against the glass out in the lobby. There was something else. A faint call, a cry, from deeper in the station.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said. I knew what it was. I went down the corridor, Aaron trailing behind me, to the cell block. The station has four jail cells, little modern things, with solid doors and tiny Plexiglass windows.

  Ash was in the last one. Varley had taken him out of the medical centre and locked him up a couple of days ago. He’d heard us talking, and was pressing his face up against the window, desperately peering out. For a moment he reminded me of the zombies pressing up against the front door – that’s how badly dehydrated he was. “Aaron!” he croaked. “Matt! What the fuck’s going on?”

  “Zombie horde,” I said. “Fuck knows. We’re trying to call for help.”

  “Water,” he said. “Please, water, please...”

  Aaron hunted for the cell keys – hopefully Varley hadn’t kept those on his person as well – while I went back out into the main office, into the little kitchenette. The water there must have been on mains from the desal, because with the power off the taps weren’t working, but the kettle was still half full so I took that back in, past Colin leaning in to the microphone and repeating: “Mundrabilla Roadhouse, do you read me? This is Colin Rae from Eucla Roadhouse, are you receiving?”

  Aaron had found a set of the cell keys at the warden’s desk and was opening the door as I returned; Ash took the kettle from my hands and started drinking it greedily. “Easy!” I said. “You’ll make yourself sick. Have a few sips and lie down.”

  “I want to get out of here,” Ash said, standing up, looking delirious, trying to walk out of the cell.

  “You’re not going very far,” I said. “Place is surrounded by zombies.”

  Still, I could understand wanting to get out of the cell after being trapped in there for days, thinking that maybe everyone outside was dead. Aaron and I each took one of his arms over our shoulders and helped him out into the corridor. I didn’t like Ash, I never would, but it was hard to feel that old level of hatred I had for this wretched, half-dead figure.

  We were halfway down the corridor back to the main office when we heard the sound of shattering glass.

  My stomach dropped. Aaron and I both knew what that noise meant. We abandoned Ash and ran towards the main office. At the doorway I saw a brief glimpse, a screenshot of a terrifying moment: Colin getting to his feet with the headphones still dangling around his neck, reaching for one of his Glocks, a handful of zombies stumbling into the room...

  ...but that handful was just the surging head of the wave, and as the three of us opened fire we knew within seconds that it was pointless, that dozens and dozens and dozens more were coming behind them. Colin, on the other side of the room, was lost from sight in seconds as the grotesque tide of grinning corpses started pouring into the room. Out on the street, it had been bad enough – inside an enclosed building, the sheer numbers sparked a terror I don’t think I’d felt since all of this started.

  Aaron and I fell back down the corridor, walking backwards, firing blindly at head height. Some of the bullets struck home, drilling through skulls, dropping corpses to the ground – but within seconds they were gone, invisible, swallowed by the advancing tide. We were pacing backwards on sheer adrenaline knowing full well that it was a dead-end corridor, ending in the row of prison cells.

  My revolver ran dry before Aaron’s Glock. I turned and ran, my brain drenched in animal terror, catching up to Ash as he hobbled back into the cell. I pushed him inside, out of the way, and turned back to shout at Aaron – but he’d cut and run as well, was hurtling down the corridor ahead of the advancing press of undead. He threw himself inside the cell and I pulled the door shut...

  ...only realising as I did that it was, of course, a prison cell. It was designed to be closed or locked from the inside. It was like hiding in a cupboard. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!” I hissed, pulling it as close as it would go, looking up out the little Plexiglass window at the advancing, grinning undead that were suddenly only a metre away.

  It was okay, as it turned out. Zombies are too dumb to know how to work a door, to realise they could just put a hand in and pull it open, like tearing off a tuna lid to reveal the food inside. They just mindlessly press towards you. So as I was staring out the window about to shit my pants, their forward motion just shoved the door shut, sealing the three of us inside as more and more of them pushed up against it, snarling at the glass.

  So we were safe.

  Hooray.

  That was about an hour ago. It feels a bit like being on a broken-down submarine at the bottom of an ocean trench: good news, you still have structural integrity, the ocean isn’t about the burst in the porthole. Now you get to sit here for a few days and die slowly.

  We have the kettle, still, about half full. I guess that’s a litre? Ash is still badly dehydrated but Aaron and I are fine, for now, since everyone in the pub had access to the water tank. I wonder how the poor bastards on top of the servo are going.

  Aaron still has half a clip in the Glock and another spare. I’ve got about twenty revolver bullets tucked away in various pockets – I stocked up before we jumped from the pub. So, hooray, at least if push comes to shove we don’t have to die a slow death.

  Mundrabilla has to come. They can’t put up with a horde of zombies on their doorstep. They have to come.

  3.00pm

  It started raining about an hour ago. We can hear it drumming down on the roof. Good for the people on the roof of the servo; not much use to us, rationing this bloody kettle.

  Aaron had the idea of blocking the cell door’s window, so maybe the zombies wouldn’t be able to see us and will wander back off to the pub – maybe we can get back out into the police station, find some way out a back door or onto the roof, or at any rate escape the worst-case-scenario hell that we’re in at the moment. It’s not a big window – his own t-shirt easily covers it – but of course we have no way of affixing it there. So instead he’s decided to just stand there, holding it up.

  “Maybe that’s worse,” I said. “If you’re standing there and the door’s not properly sealed shut, maybe they can just smell you better.”

  “How do you know they smell?” Aaron said.

  “How do you know they see?”

  We don’t know a fucking thing about them, really. We don’t know what they are or how they work or how they sense us or what we can do to stop them, apart from smashing their heads open.

  I’m starting to feel a bit delirious in here. Ash has sunk i
nto a half-asleep state, some kind of catatonic response to dehydration and utter terror. Aaron is standing there holding his shirt over the window – which I think is ultimately pointless and a bit ridiculous, and also for the first time I’m looking at how many cuts and scars and injuries his body (and presumably mine) has sustained in the last few months. And here I am, scribbling away, like Aaron used to, like it fucking matters.

  I wonder if Colin made it. Probably not. And probably we’re not going to either.

  3.30pm

  Ash has started mumbling about stuff so I’m writing it down. Nothing else to do. Aaron’s still standing there with the Vigil of the T-Shirt. The zombies are still snarling behind the glass and the foolproof hunter’s blind of his cotton fabric. Fuck’s sake. What’s the point?

  Anyway, Ash seems compelled to spill his guts out. After we’d parted ways he and Liam and their other mates had drifted around the South West for a while, taking what supplies they could, fighting zombies, fleeing from large hordes. As more and more refugees died off and the amount of undead grew ever-greater, Liam and his mates fled east. “We killed a family,” Ash said numbly, staring at the ceiling, his words slurring from his swollen tongue. “A mum and a dad and two little kids, boy and a girl. Near Fitzgerald River. They had food, we didn’t... Liam didn’t even care, didn’t even just take it and tell them to fuck off. He shot them all, he wanted to shoot them... He didn’t used to be like that, you know? Something broke. He wasn’t a bad guy. He had a little girl – his girlfriend was a fucking psycho, but he had a little girl, she was his whole world...”

  “She die?” Aaron asked. “When everything went to shit?”

  “Nah. Last year. Car accident. He wasn’t the same after that, he started using more...”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Shut the fuck up. He was a piece of shit and he’s dead.”

  “You didn’t know him,” Ash murmured, his eyes closed.

  “Yeah, actually, I did,” I said. “I think it was you that didn’t know him.”

  Ash mumbled something incoherent. Soon he slipped off into a dehydrated stupor.

  Whatever. He’s not getting any more water.

  5.00pm

  Aaron was just about at the end of his arms’ stress tolerance, holding up a t-shirt against a glass window. I could feel it in my own arms, that dull ache, the sympathy pain we’ve always had as twins. It’s just a phantom pain, though, so I took over for an hour. I wasn’t willing to do it for any longer than that because I think it’s fucking stupid. If they were that easily fooled they would have left by now. So in the end we had an argument about whether we should keep it there or not, and I refused to do it any longer and Aaron took over again, which is what he’s doing now, standing there with his boots and jeans and bare chest and his burningly tired arms, holding a bloodied grey K-Mart t-shirt against a Plexiglass window in the stubborn belief that we can hide our way out of this. Like an emu sticking its head in the sand. Or is that ostriches?

  We still have some kettle water left. I still feel faint-headed. This is it. This is really it, isn’t it?

  5.30pm

  It’s getting dark in here. Too dark to write. There’s no exterior window, just the one in the door looking into the windowless corridor – the one now blocked up with zombies. Aaron’s still holding his stupid fucking shirt over the stupid fucking window. Ash is asleep.

  I know we’ll live to see the sunrise. We have enough water for that, and the dead literally can’t break in here – it’s a very solid door, obviously.

  But I don’t know if we’ll live to see the next one.

  I don’t want to die like this.

  April 26

  7.30am

  That was one of the longest nights of my life. I was exhausted from lack of food and water - we drank what was left in the kettle and I was still thirsty – but there was no chance I’d be able to sleep. It was absolutely pitch black inside the cell, and the zombies at the door were snarling and grunting all night long.

  Ash slept, though. I sat on the floor beside him listening to his breathing very carefully, like a parent with a newborn baby, only I was holding a loaded revolver in my lap. Ash had been without food or water for longer than Aaron and I, and if he suddenly passed away in the night... well, I didn’t like the idea of being locked in a pitch black cell with a sudden zombie.

  I may have nodded off once or twice during the night, having long, exhausted thoughts that turned into waking dreams. Dreams about Perth, dreams about Dad, dreams about friends from high school. Dreams, again, about the bloody snow somewhere off in the east, dreams that left me with a strange compulsion to throw open the cell door, push my way past the ranked undead, and started marching off down the eastern highway.

  I’m sick of those dreams. They feel too uncomfortably repetitive.

  The sun must have come up a little while ago, because it’s light out in the corridor again, trickling into the cell as a greyish half-light. The zombies are still at the door, still pressing their awful grinning faces up against the glass. Aaron gave up on holding up the t-shirt. He’s slumped down by the door, grey-faced, defeated. Ash is still asleep.

  Maybe Colin made it out. I hope at least Colin made it out.

  3.00pm

  Some time around the middle of the day, we had cause for hope. “You hear that?” Aaron said. “Listen.”

  It was gunfire. Over the snarling of the zombies right at our door, somewhere outside the police station, we could hear distant gunfire. It went on for a while, maybe five or ten minutes. Then there was silence.

  Our hopes faded. Maybe it had just been another escape attempt from the Amber Hotel, snipers on the roof covering people dashing across crowded ground.

  But then, maybe an hour later, we heard gunshots again – much closer this time – then shouts and yells that were unmistakeably coming from the police station lobby. Aaron and I looked at each other with thrilled excitement and jumped to our feet, peering out the window in the cell door, trying to see past the zombie heads on the other side.

  Somewhere down the other end of the corridor, people were fighting the undead – we could only glimpse a vague blur of motion, of close combat weapons and zombies turning and staggering. The ones right at the door were blocking our view, and they weren’t going anywhere, not when Aaron and I were just a few centimetres away. But in a few moments we could see that the party at the other end had lured the vast bulk of the undead outside, to fight them in the wider space. Only four zombies were left outside our door, grunting and shrieking at us.

  “We can take them,” I said, holding the revolver and moving to push the door open.

  Aaron grabbed my wrist. “Don’t be a fucking idiot! Just wait for them to come back.”

  He was right. I had cabin fever. Something inside me was screaming to get out of the cell now, while we had the chance – what if the clearing party didn’t return? What if it was just all the zombies again, shambling down towards us? What if we didn’t get a chance like this again, dangerous as it was?

  The clearing party did return, of course – about ten people, with Geoff and Jonas at their head. “Thank God!” Geoff said, once they’d killed the last four and pulled the door open. “We thought you were goners for sure.”

  “Water, please” I said hoarsely.

  Someone passed me a canteen. The next thing I wanted most was to get the fuck away from that cell. I staggered down the corridor, out of the police station. Nobody tried to stop me, so I assumed it was safe.

  The streets of Eucla looked like a battleground. There were hundreds and hundreds of corpses, lying scattered about in the dirt and gravel. Parties of armed men and women were clearing out the houses and other interior buildings, and I could hear regular gunfire. The pub looked like a bomb had gone off on the ground floor: every window shattered, the furniture inside overturned, blood smeared across the walls and broken glass scattered everywhere. Somewhere off to the west, beyond the town walls, there was a thick, oily plum
e of smoke rising into the sky.

  I went back to the pub, feeling half-dazed. I remember finding Ellie, having one of those tearful “I thought you were dead” reunions that I didn’t think I was ever going to have to have again. I certainly felt dead. I took a bottle of water and some tinned beans from the kitchen and went upstairs to eat while she explained what had happened while Aaron and I had been stuck in the police station.

  The sentries had survived. Sergeant Varley, Len Waters and the others had been taken by surprise as much as we had when the dead started spilling out of the northern desert, but they’d had the good fortune to be outside the walls rather than inside – they had space to run. They realised pretty quickly that this wasn’t going to be a situation we could solve ourselves. They made for the airstrip, first, thinking they could get to the plane – but the dead were everywhere, all over the highway and all over the airstrip. Len said there was zero chance they’d be able to take off. And there were no cars at the airstrip either.

  That meant they went on foot. They were headed for Mundrabilla. They had to run at first, avoiding the dozens and dozens of zombies scattered across the highway. A few kilometres west of Eucla, the undead herd had thinned – it had come from the north, and it seemed most of them had been drawn straight for the town. So they’d been able to slow down. They couldn’t stop, though – they’d picked up a trail of about seventy or eighty zombies, following them along.

  So that was their first night: walking, for ten or eleven hours, without rest or reprieve, along the blacktop of the Eyre Highway in the moonless dark.

  The Mundrabillans were not particularly pleased to see them. Jackson Wesley, the town’s de facto mayor, has a beef with Varley anyway – but nobody’s going to be pleased to see a few exhausted survivors showing up trailing nearly a hundred zombies. The Mundrabillans gunned down their pursuers and demanded an explanation. Varley explained what had happened and asked for assistance.

  Jackson and his fellows were not thrilled by the idea of it. All Varley could tell them was that thousands of zombies had just poured out of the desert to the north; the people of Mundrabilla were more interested in locking down their own town in case any more came. It took all day on the 24th for Varley to convince them to at least drive up the highway and scope it out.