End Times: Rise of the Undead

by Shane Carrow

  Matt stared down at his bowl of beans and tomatoes. “This place will kill us if we stay here, Aaron.”

  “We could go back to the shops,” I said uneasily. “Buy more bottled water.”

  Matt gave a bitter laugh. “Buy? I think you mean take. The shops are shut by now, Aaron, but that doesn’t matter either way, because they’re looted by now too, they’ll be empty, and I don’t think we need to go down there to double-check that.” He paused. “Come on, man. Be smart. You know we can’t stay here. I know you know that.”

  I stared at the flickering candlelight, avoiding his gaze. “Yeah. I know. I just don’t think it’s safe out there.”

  “Of course it isn’t. But it’s not safe in here, either.” He hesitated. “You know what I did while you were asleep this morning? I went up and down the street. Knocked on every door. Twenty houses. And you know what? Not a single person answered. They’ve all gone, Aaron. And we should go too.”

  I should have thought of that – checking on the neighbours. We don’t know our neighbours at all, but an emergency pandemic should be enough to foster a sense of community spirit.

  It occurred to me, though, that just because they hadn’t answered Matt’s knocking didn’t mean they weren’t there. What would we do, in this changed environment, if somebody hammered on our door at dawn? Maybe all Matt had done was panic the whole street. Made them reach for the weapons under the bed until the noise went away.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “Bunbury, I guess,” he said. “Try to find Dad.”

  “You know the roads will be blocked,” I said. “Checkpoints and all that shit.”

  “According to who?”

  “People were saying it on Twitter.”

  Matt snorted.

  “What? Real people, Matt. The Kwinana Freeway’s closed for sure – even Channel 7 said that before they went off air. God knows what else you’re going to find on the back streets.”

  “Well, I know what we’re going to find if we stay here,” he said. “Slow death.”

  We said nothing, scraping at our beans with out forks, watching the candle flicker. Two weeks ago I’d been playing video games, lying on the beach and worrying about my WACE score. And now this. I guess this is how they felt in Syria.

  I guess this is how everyone in the world feels right now.

  “I’m packing a bag tonight,” Matt said. “Food, clothes, toothbrush. You should too. Anything you want to keep. We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”

  I’ve packed a bag. I don’t like letting Matt tell me what to do, but I can’t talk him out of something once he’s set his mind to it, and splitting up isn’t an option.

  Besides, he might be right. Leaving and staying are equally bad options. There are no good options anymore. Maybe this is better. At least this way we’ll have a chance.

  January 17

  In the morning, before we left, I turned my phone on to see if I could glean any information about where we were headed. But the network had gone down – just “SOS ONLY.” I’m with Optus, Matt’s with Vodafone, and neither of us had a signal. No power, no water, no gas, no internet. I tried ringing 000, but it just played out a recording of the emergency broadcast system, telling us to shelter in place and avoid contact with the infected – nothing useful about infection zones or evacuation points.

  “Looks like we’re on our own,” Matt said.

  We’d gone out in the middle of the night and packed as much food and water as we could into the boot of his Hyundai. Matt did the packing, while I stood at the edge of the driveway and kept watch. There was no movement anywhere to be seen, no candlelight in any of the windows. The wind was up and the foliage of the gum trees along the street was thrashing and shifting, a noise I’ve always found strangely eerie.

  But nothing loomed up out of the darkness to attack us. We packed the car and went back inside to sleep. Or in my case, at least, to stare at the ceiling.

  I’d packed a duffel bag. A change of clothes, my toothbrush, some painkillers, this journal, and my laptop. It might be dead weight but it’s the most valuable thing I own and I didn’t want to leave it behind. And about the only sentimental thing I own – a photo of Mum, holding both of us as toddlers, a few months before she died. I cracked the frame open and put it in my jeans pocket.

  “You ready?” Matt said in the entry hall.

  I looked around the house – the photos on the wall, the PS4 controllers on the coffee table, Dad’s golf clubs in the corner of the living room, the pictures we’d drawn in kindergarten that Dad still kept on the fridge. A lifetime of memories inside four walls.

  But Matt was coming with me. And we were going to find Dad.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He opened the front door and we went out to the car. It was an hour after dawn, the street deathly quiet, and already the heat was shimmering on the bitumen. Nobody accosted us as we went out to the Hyundai, sat inside, and started the engine. I watched the silent houses slide past as we drove out of our street for what might be the last time.

  Matt drove towards Leach Highway, and I flicked the radio on. In the few days since the power had gone off, so had most of the radio channels. All that was left was the emergency broadcast system yet again, on a number of frequencies. It was a slightly different version to the 000 one, possibly a nationwide syndicate, because it was listing off evacuation points in the Sydney metropolitan area. It may as well have been talking about the moon.

  We saw the first of the infected as we approached Leach Highway – pale, sometimes splashed with blood, stumbling about on the footpaths and on the road. My heart rate shot up, and stayed up. Matt had to swerve to avoid them more than once. Near the on-ramp to the highway there was a whole group of them gathered around something on the ground. They turned to look at the car as we drove past, began to give chase, dispersing enough that I caught a glimpse of what they’d been gathered around – a mangled human body. Their mouths were rimmed with red.

  “Did you see that?” I demanded, twisting my head to look back at them. “Jesus Christ, they were fucking eating someone!”

  “Trying to drive here!” Matt said tersely.

  We reached Leach Highway and after a moment Matt swung off it again onto Karel Avenue. We knew the freeway was jammed with abandoned cars, so the plan was to head down to South Street, and then follow it all the way east onto the Tonkin Highway, and then down towards the South West Highway. On that we could clear the city, and follow it all the way down to Bunbury – hoping and praying that the situation outside Perth was better than inside Perth.

  On South Street we started seeing clearer signs of the crisis. Crowds of the infected, stumbling up onto the road, mindlessly shambling towards us. They didn’t seem to care if they were coming into the path of a speeding car, and Matt had to swerve constantly. Eventually he clipped a woman, knocking her aside with a sickening thump. “Jesus Christ, Matt!” I shrieked.

  “Will you shut up?” he screamed.

  I was twisting in my seat, looking back at her. She was already pulling herself up to her feet and joining the others in coming after us. As though she’d never been hit at all.

  We saw abandoned cars by the side of the road – maybe they’d been less lucky than us, maybe they’d been mobbed by the infected. We saw an overturned police car – God knows what had happened there. We saw bodies lying in the street, torn apart, their stomachs ruptured and their intestines splayed across the bitumen. My stomach was clenched with animal terror, churning horribly, and I felt like I was going to shit myself. “We should have stayed at the house,” I started whispering. “We should have stayed at the house, we should have stayed at the house, we should have stayed at the house…”

  “Shut up!” Matt yelled, weaving left and right through the thickening numbers of infected, the thumps of bodies glancing off the bonnet becoming more frequent. “Shut the fuck up!”

  We were approaching the Roe Highway overpass. A
semitrailer had gone through the safety barrier and the cab was dangling precariously above us. As I looked up, I saw infected stumbling off the edge. They could see the car coming towards them and they wanted it, mindlessly, brainlessly, pushing forward like lemmings. The first one tumbled down onto the bitumen and lay there, broken, legs snapped like matchsticks. “Oh, my God,” I said. But that wasn’t all. More were tumbling over the edge, dropping down onto us, and even as Matt tried to swerve, it was too late. As we entered the shadow of the overpass, the roof of the Hyundai suddenly crumpled in.

  Matt braked, the car spun out, and we ploughed into a concrete freeway barrier. The airbags burst out of the dashboard, blinding and suffocating us.

  I thrashed my way through the slowly deflating airbag, forced the crumpled door open with my shoulder and staggered out of the car. I was running on pure adrenaline now, my body’s survival instinct overruling any sense of shock or horror. The infected were still stumbling towards us, eagerly closing the distance, filling the air with their horrible hunting shrieks. The one that had landed on top of the car had been thrown off when Matt had swerved, thank God, but even as I looked behind us more of them were toppling off the elevated highway and dropping onto the bitumen with sickening thumps. Some of them were getting back up again. Some of them were crawling along, pulling themselves by their hands, dragging broken legs behind them.

  I could have gone to pieces then. I could feel the hysteria rising up inside my gut, could feel the scream coming. But I clamped down on it. I knew that if I lost my shit then both of us would die.

  Matt hadn’t got out of the car. He was making feeble scrapes against the inside of his door. I ran around to his side of the car and tried to yank the door open, but the crash had buckled it worse than my own. Without even thinking, I lifted my leg and kicked in the already fractured window. Matt had blood on his face – he’d been struck by the roof buckling in – and he seemed woozy and slow. “Get out!” I yelled. “Get the fuck out!” I had to physically reach in, unbuckle his seatbelt and drag him out through the window, both of us slashing our skin on the remaining shards of glass, blood everywhere.

  I glanced around in panic, still holding Matt up, and saw the infected closing in on us on all sides. Our bags were in the back seat of the car and the boot was full of food, but we had no time for that. “Come on, let’s go!” I yelled. Matt was still groggy. I had to support him as we staggered across the road, crossed the crash barrier, and struggled up the sandy scrubland of the embankment to the brick wall at the edge of the highway.

  I had to boost Matt up. He wasn’t talking, but even in his addled state he seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. I scrambled over the bricks after him and we found ourselves in one of those grotty industrial areas, a bunch of service roads and scrappy gum trees and chain-link fences. In front of us was what looked like a junkyard, surrounded by fencing, thankfully without barbed wire. I could see more of the infected on this side of the wall, stumbling towards us down the service road. “Next fence,” I gasped. “Come on.”

  Matt was touching the blood on his head and swearing. I could see his wits starting to gather themselves, but I still had to help him over the fence. Together we toppled over it into the junkyard, and although there didn’t seem to be any infected in here, I grabbed Matt’s arm and made a beeline for one of the buildings anyway. I wanted to get out of sight. The door, thank Christ, was unlocked.

  It was a workshop-cum-office, smelling of must and motor oil. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, although I could already tell from the silence that it was empty. I dropped Matt onto the concrete floor, shoved a desk in front of the door, and then made a sweep of the workshop. There was a monkey wrench sitting on a work table and I took it and held it in both hands as I went.

  Would I really be able to do that? Swing it into the face of somebody, a sick and disturbed person? Hurt them, maybe even kill them? After what had just happened on the highway – after the crash and the terror and the near-death experience, with adrenaline still flooding my bloodstream, and fresh memories of the horrors we’d seen on the way there – you bet your ass I could. It was us or them.

  There was a set of roller doors at the far end of the workshop that were closed and locked. Stacks of car chassis, a half-dismantled engine, a fetid bathroom and a computer with an old school blocky monitor. Light filtered in from a narrow window up on the high wall. It was safe for the moment.

  I went back over to Matt and knelt down next to him, rubbing my temples. My head felt like it was about to split open. “You okay?”

  “I’ve got a real bad fucking headache,” he murmured, with his eyes closed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know, you know.”

  “Right,” Matt muttered.

  I took the cleanest rag I could find and started daubing the blood away from his head. It looked like he was going to have a nasty lump, but the blood had mostly congealed. “Look at me,” I said. “Let me see your pupils. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Two,” Matt said, correctly. “I think I’m all right. Fucking hell. That was intense.”

  That was a relief. If he’d actually had double vision I’m not sure what I was supposed to do about it.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. Now that the adrenaline was flagging, now that the immediate danger was over, a sense of horror was creeping back into my stomach. The car was totalled and we were stranded. What the fuck were we going to do now?

  First things first. Both of us had cut ourselves badly when I dragged him out the driver’s window, and again as we climbed over the walls and the fence. There was a first-aid kit in the corner of the workshop, and I cracked it open and set about disinfecting and bandaging our cuts. “Water running here?” Matt asked.

  I went into the bathroom and checked. “No. Toilet cistern’s full, but I’d have to be pretty thirsty for it to come to that.”

  He pulled himself to his feet, one hand on the work table, wobbling a little. “What’s it like outside? Any of them out there?”

  “Not out the back,” I said, putting a hand around his other arm to steady him. “But I didn’t really see the whole place. And I think the front of it’s open to the road.” I looked around. “This isn’t… this isn’t ideal.”

  “No,” Matt said. “Fuck no. But maybe we should wait a bit. Wait for night-time, check the place out. Maybe we can even go back to the car and get our shit.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I hadn’t exactly had time to do a head count, but there’d been dozens of them out there at least.

  But he’s right. I can’t hear anything out there, but it would still be safer to investigate after dark. So we’re waiting.

  We got here at seven in the morning. That’s a long time to wait.

  Matt’s gone rummaging around in the tools, looking for something to arm himself with. He settled on a jumbo spanner. I’ve got the monkey wrench.

  Could I actually do it? I know I said I could before, when I was still humming with terror. But these are people we’re talking about, not monsters, even if they are sick and dangerous. I don’t even like to kill a bug.

  But before, at the crash, I had space to run. If I was cornered, if one of them was coming right for me…

  I think I could do it. Yeah. If I had no other choice.

  I keep thinking about the ones who fell off the overpass. The ones who broke their legs and didn’t care, just hauled themselves along the bitumen, ripping their fingers to shreds dragging their shattered legs behind them. What kind of virus can make someone do that? What living creature can put up with that pain?

  I’ve still got a fucking headache, speaking of pain. It’s Matt’s headache, actually – I didn’t clip my head at all – but when it’s bad enough, we share each other’s pain. We always have. A twin thing, a psychic thing, whatever you want to call it. There it is. I wrote it down. Can’t hide from it now.

  I’m not the kind of person who believes in that sort of shit
, trust me. But, well… yeah. It’s always been there. We learned pretty early not to mention it to other people. I’d never tell anyone about it normally, never even write it down. But fuck, what’s it matter? When shit like this is happening, who’s gonna call me crazy? Who’s ever even going to read this thing?

  How many journal entries will I even make it up to? January? February? March?

  I was meant to be starting uni in a month.

  January 18

  A day was a long time to wait. I got fucking hungry, for a start. You don’t think about three square meals a day until you don’t have them any more, and suddenly it’s all you can think about.

  Well. Not quite. I was thinking about the crash as well, about how lucky we’d been – never mind the infected. Matt had braked quickly and we hadn’t hit the barrier too hard. But what if we had? What if it had been just slightly worse? What if he’d slashed his head more badly than he had, what if he’d fractured his skull and needed a hospital?

  Because we can’t go to a hospital. Even if we got there, what state would it be in? And that – the fact that I can’t take Matt to hospital, I can’t call an ambulance, I can’t call the police – that’s the most frightening thing of all.

  We really are on our own.

  After dark we moved the desk, opened the door and went silently back out into the junkyard. The wind was blowing, shaking the branches of the trees, which would hopefully mask any noise we made. Up above the stars I could see the lights of a pair of planes, RAAF I guess, circling the city at high altitude. Silent blinking lights. Weirdly enough, they made me feel better. They might not be able to help us, but at least they proved there were still other people out there doing OK. That we weren’t the last people left alive in the world.

  We crept around the junkyard carefully, and found that the fence only surrounded the back half of the lot; the front was open to the road. It was an empty commercial street of smash repair shops, scrapyards, that sort of thing. Industrial bleakness. Further down towards the end of the road was what looked like an office park. “That might be our best bet,” I whispered.