by Shane Carrow
“Better safe than sorry, don’t you reckon?” Matt said, and wheeled our own trolley off down the canned food aisle.
I felt sick. I know how dumb it sounds, but this isn’t supposed to happen. Not in Perth. Disasters don’t happen here.
But maybe everyone just has Matt’s opinion. They’re worried, but they don’t necessarily think the pandemic is about to come crashing through their living room window. They just want to be prepared. They’re not panicked.
But that’s how panic starts, isn’t it? When you see hundreds of other people swarming to the supermarket.
And we were right there with them, helping it along.
Matt and I filled the trolley with what was left of the canned food and bottled water, and we stood in a line of thirty people to go through a harried check-out. A bumper day for Coles – the bill came to $178, which thankfully I only just had in my bank account.
We drove home in silence, listening to the ABC, which was reporting on the outbreak in Fremantle. Everybody in the City of Stirling and the City of Melville is being ordered to “shelter in place.” On the way back, we were overtaken by a convoy of military vehicles coming down Leach Highway from the east, a bunch of trucks full of soldiers and a trio of Army tanks, cruising along the asphalt at surprising speed, heading straight for Freo.
Rossmoyne – our suburb – is right on the edge of the City of Melville.
As soon as we got home I started unpacking the food. Matt went through the entire kitchen, found every vessel he could, and we filled them with water. Then we filled up every sink and bathtub in the house.
I tried to call Dad, but it wouldn’t go through. I guess everybody’s trying to call their family now. All the WA media is focusing on Perth. I have no idea what’s going on down in Bunbury.
January 11
A full curfew has been declared in Perth. Nobody is supposed to go anywhere for any reason except essential service personnel. The power is still running and the water’s still on, so I guess “essential” includes utility workers. And I’ve seen plenty of cars go past today. Maybe people aren’t paying attention to it.
Dad called me tonight, on the landline rather than my mobile. “Thank God,” he said. “Are you OK?”
“We’re fine. How are you?”
“We’re both OK. We’re at Bunbury Hospital. Don’t go anywhere, Aaron, you understand? Either of you. Pay attention to the curfew.”
“I know,” I said. “We are. Are you coming home?”
“I can’t,” he said. “They’ve locked down the roads. I told them I had kids in the city, but they didn’t care.” He sounded furious. “Aaron, promise me, please, that you’ll just stay there until I get back. OK? And for God’s sake, take care of your brother.”
“Matt? What? He’s fine. It was his idea to stock up on food.”
“Is he there now?”
I glanced out of the kitchen. Matt was in the living room with his laptop open in front of him and the TV on, the lights off, the glow of moving images shifting across the walls. “Yeah,” I said.
“Put him on.”
I handed the phone over to Matt, and they had a short, curt conversation, which I only heard Matt’s side of. “What do you mean, when they sort it out?” Matt said. “They haven’t sorted out jack shit so far. This is gonna get worse before it gets better.” Then: “Yeah. Uh-huh. OK. OK, fine. All right. I love you too.”
He hung up. “This is fucked, man,” he said, still staring at the TV. “Totally fucked.” He was flicking between channels: first an aerial shot of the military camps and tents and temporary airfields that had sprung up around Ground Zero at Ballarat; then shaky camera footage of a crowd of infected in a city that seemed South-East Asian, with palm trees along the streets and dozens of abandoned, scattered scooters on the road; then a newsreader with bags under his eyes speaking to some kind of expert in the studio, with a map behind them showing glowing red infection outbreaks in cities across six continents.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“Sit tight, I guess. Wait to see what the Army does.”
I sat down on the couch next to him, and we watched the news footage in silence for a while.
“I wish Dad was here,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”
January 12
WACE results were supposed to be released today. I sat at my laptop at the kitchen table for two hours this morning, constantly clicking refresh, seeing only the same dull, ordinary Department of Education website. I was supposed to find out today what was going to happen this year: whether I had the grades to go to university to study journalism, or whether I was going to do God knows what else.
But I guess none of that’s on the cards anymore.
They said on the news today that they “lost Melbourne.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? “Lost?” Like it’s a remote control or a receipt or a fucking bushwalker? What the hell does “lost” mean?
January 13
The ABC is no longer broadcasting, at least not in Perth. Instead we get the Emergency Broadcast System. A constant flow of calm and steady information about which zones are still safe, which zones are considered compromised, which zones have mandatory evacuation priority. It’s not calm and steady at all, of course, because to turn your TV on and see something that isn’t supposed to be there induces a very special kind of skin-crawling terror.
On the maps they’ve put together, the north of the river is a swathe of red. Matt and I sat on the roof today with Dad’s expensive German binoculars, watching the distant skyscrapers, the plumes of smoke from somewhere over Northbridge, the boats on the river staging an evacuation point from Shelley Beach. “Some kind of roadblock on the Mount Henry Bridge,” Matt said, the binoculars pressed against his eyes, pointing at the distant bridge above the gleaming river. Sandbags and concrete barriers, APCs and police cars, dozens of men in military fatigues with heavy machine guns pointed north. “Trying to stop shit from coming south of the Canning.”
“But it’s already in Fremantle,” I said. “And what are they gonna do? Shoot them? Shoot sick people?”
“Well, maybe,” Matt said. “You heard what they were saying about Melbourne.”
I did. I heard a lot of horrible things about Melbourne.
We spent a long time trying to spot any activity in our neighbourhood, but Rossmoyne is mostly quiet. A few military convoys and plenty of people fleeing in their cars on Leach Highway, but that’s it. I guess most people are staying in their houses.
“Maybe we should try to leave,” I said, looking down at Matt’s Hyundai parked in the driveway.
“Where would we go?”
“Bunbury? I dunno. We could try to find Dad.”
Matt seemed to think about it for a moment, but then shook his head. “He wanted us to stay here. Besides, go out there and you’ll end up infected. Whole fucking city’s an infection zone now. We’ve got food and water. We stay put.”
We stayed on the roof for the rest of the day, comparing the vague and distant information our own eyes gave us with up-to-the-minute alerts and notices and eyewitness accounts on our phones. Rossmoyne stayed quiet. Nothing much stirring in our neck of the woods.
In the afternoon a squadron of military choppers came flying up from Jandakot, staying low, right over the rooftops, so close I almost felt like we’d be blown right off. There were three of them, heading north in formation. Black Hawks, I think. They were full of what looked like special forces soldiers, wearing black body armour and black gas masks and carrying black rifles, their feet sticking out over the sides of the chopper, bearing north to the swelling crisis in the city. One of them turned his head and looked at me as they passed – and then they were gone.
January 14
Matt came into my bedroom and shook me awake early this morning. “It’s fine, it’s okay!” he whispered. “Don’t panic. Everything’s fine. But come on. You need to see this.”
It was five in th
e morning, and my bedroom was filled with grey twilight. Birds were chirping and singing outside. I pulled my pants on and followed Matt down the hallway, into Dad’s empty bedroom, which faces onto the street. Matt pressed a finger to his lips, moved silently to the side of the window, and gestured for me to stay hidden but to peek outside. As I eased my head past the curtains, I already knew I was going to see.
There was a scattered collection of them moving down the street – pacing stiffly, awkwardly, like their bones were locking up. I could hear their noise over the dawn chorus of songbirds: a sort of violent, growling purring. Empty-minded mutterings. They were twitching their heads and staggering with a single-minded purpose down the road. I counted nine, ten, eleven… then one more straggler, an old woman, reading glasses still dangling from the gold chain around her neck, shuffling along at a slow pace.
Then the road was empty again. The rising sun was flaring over the rooftops. Matt tapped my shoulder, leaving the bedroom. I followed him out into the hallway and he shut the door quietly behind us.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I was shaking.
“Tell me about it.” He went into the living room and turned the TV on, immediately thumbing the remote to turn to volume down low. “A guy ran past about ten minutes ago, screaming his head off. They’re following him. I counted thirty before I came and woke you up. So that was forty-two, all up. Maybe more.”
I sat down on the couch with a heavy thump. For two weeks I’ve been sitting here parsing the news, clicking links, watching bulletins, refreshing Twitter. Nothing – not the trip to the cleared-out supermarket, not Dad’s frightened phone call from Bunbury, not even watching choppers full of military commandos flying north into the city – had hammered it home quite as much as seeing those poor, twisted, infected souls stumbling down my own street in my own suburb.
And I couldn’t help but think: everybody says they’re dangerous. Violent, degenerate monsters who’ve lost their minds, who’ll attack you on sight like a rabid dog. What if Matt and I hadn’t stayed quiet? What if we’d gone out there into the street? What would they have done to us? If we’d just walked out there with our arms outstretched? We come in peace?
Fuck. Fucking hell.
For the rest of the day we stared at the TV. Channel 9 and Channel 10 have gone off the air; ABC and SBS have switched to the emergency broadcast system; Channel 7 seems to be syndicating a feed from their Adelaide newsroom, maybe the last one they still have staffed, with an exhausted-looking presenter listing off a feed of evacuation points around South Australia.
My Twitter feed is slowing down. Nowhere near as many updates as a few days ago. It’s a queasy string of juxtaposition: I’ve got the New York Times retweeting FEMA tips about keeping water potable, right above a tweet from a Scottish comedian desperately pleading for information about his family in Glasgow. I’ve got a BBC News tweet charting the outbreaks in Europe right above a tweet from a high school acquaintance who moved to Melbourne last year, describing the conditions in a military evacuation camp in the Latrobe Valley. I’ve still – amazingly – got promoted tweets from Bunnings about a summer holiday sale, next to a tweet from an American journo issuing a general prayer to God.
What the hell is happening to us? How are we going to get through this?
January 15
Sometime last night the power went off. I woke up to dead light switches, a silent TV and a laptop which suddenly feels quite useless without a wifi router.
The water was off as well. That was worse. We’ve all been through blackouts – just a part of life – but to turn the tap and not have water come out? That twisted something inside me, some deep and panicky fear. That’s when you realise you don’t even know how the water system works. That’s when you realise just how dependent you are on things you don’t understand, and just how deeply fucked you are when they’re gone.
We’d filled the sinks and bathtubs full of water back when things started getting grim, but we’d also picked up actual proper water from the supermarket and I saw no reason not to use that first, so I took a bottle of Mt Franklin out of the shrink-wrapped slab in the rapidly warming fridge. The I went outside and climbed up the ladder to find Matt sitting on the roof with Dad’s binoculars, chewing on a muesli bar. Straight away, without even looking at me, he asked how much phone battery I had left.
“28%,” I said. I’d forgotten to plug it in before I went to sleep.
“I was on 50% before I turned it off,” he said. “God knows how long the network will last, anyway. I tried to call Dad about fifty times last night.”
“You know the battery still drains even when it’s off?”
“Yeah, but not as fast. We might need them. Turn yours off.”
I did, although at the same time I couldn’t help thinking it was a bit naive of us, to assume that our phones might be useful, the way things were going. “You seen any more of those fucking things?” I asked.
“Not this morning,” he said. “Not here. But the barricade on the bridge is gone.”
He passed me the binoculars, and I focused in on the Mount Henry Bridge, where we’d seen a police and Army barricade only two days ago. The vehicles were gone, the bridge deserted. But in the bright morning sunlight, even at this distance, I could see dried blood splashed across the asphalt.
“I didn’t see it,” Matt said. “Must’ve happened last night.”
“I don’t know why they were blocking it in the first place,” I said. “The infection was already south of the river.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “But take a look around. You see anyone else sticking up for us?”
Leach Highway had gone silent. The evacuation point at Shelley Beach, a little further up the river, was deserted – just a scattering of abandoned sandbags and police tape. There was still a Black Hawk hovering above the northern suburbs, still a few fighter jets circling at high altitude, still an enormous plume of smoke above Northbridge – a fire that had been burning for several days now. But that was all. The suburbs around us were silent. Were people dead? Or were they just staying in their homes, like we were?
Then I looked closer. Nowhere near us - not in our street or in our block - but here and there, across Rossmoyne, in the streets between the highway and the river, there were faint signs of movement.
In their ones and twos, in tiny groups, the infected were stumbling about the suburbs. Making their way along roads, banging the windows of houses, shoving their way through bushes on highway median strips. Watching them made me feel sick. I gave the binoculars back to Matt.
“You know what they were saying?” Matt said, as I went to climb down from the roof. “On Facebook, before I turned my phone off? People are saying they aren’t sick at all. They’re saying they’re dead.”
I’d seen the same rumours myself. I’d ignored them. “That’s stupid,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re just sick, that’s all. Rabid. Psychotic.”
Matt sat at the crest of the roof with the binoculars pressed against his eyes, scanning the surrounding suburbs. A yacht was making its way downriver, although I couldn’t see the people inside it – it was just a distant spot of movement on a glittering, empty stretch of water.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
I went back inside and drank some more water. We have twelve litres of bottled Mt Franklin, a whole bunch of other bowls and jugs and cups that we filled up, plus both bathtubs and all the sinks are full – getting a bit grotty with dust and hairs floating on the surface, but still full. And then, I guess, we have the toilet cisterns.
But then what? In Perth, in summer, with no electricity and every day topping 35 degrees?
How long can we sit here and wait?
January 16
Matt and I were sitting at the dining table last night, a flickering tea candle between us, eating canned beans and tomatoes. Cold, because the gas has gone off as well. Every now and then we paused at the sound of the distant screeching of the infected, or an engin
e rumbling on the highway.
“We need to leave,” Matt said. “I’ve got a full tank of petrol in the car. That’ll get us out of the city.”
“What the fuck?” I said. “The other day you said we needed to stay put. That’s what Dad told us to do.”
“That was then. This is now. Things have changed.” Matt looked down at his bowl. “He might be dead for all we know.”
“Don’t say that,” I said sharply.
“Look,” Matt said. “Dad told us to stay here and wait for him almost a week ago. Things were totally different then. He didn’t know it would get this bad. He wouldn’t want us to just sit here like idiots, waiting to die.”
“We’re not going to die, for Christ’s sake! We’ve got plenty of food.”
“Not much water, though,” Matt said. “It’ll last a few weeks, maybe… fuck, I don’t know. I don’t know how long it’ll last. I never thought I’d have to think about something like that. And when we drink it all, then what?”
I didn’t want to say so, but I’d been thinking the same thing. “I’ll rain,” I said.
“Before we run out? We don’t know that.”
“The river’s a few blocks away.”
“The river’s fucking salty and you know it,” Matt hissed.
“Then it will rain,” I insisted.
“It’s January, man!” Matt yelled. “For fuck’s sake! Remember that hailstorm that fucked up all the cars? Like, five years ago? Remember? That summer there wasn’t any rain at all. November to March - not a single fucking drop, not until the hailstorm. Do you even remember the last time it rained, right now? November? December? It definitely wasn’t any time since Christmas. We can’t just fucking sit here and assume everything will be okay!”
I wanted to say: maybe the water will come back on. Even if it doesn’t rain, maybe the water will come back on, maybe the government will sort everything out. I wanted to say that. But I knew that wasn’t true. So I didn’t say anything.